Time Shifters 2026
Greetings Reader!
We’re back! However you do or do not celebrate a winter holiday season, I hope you’ve had both festive and restorative nature moments these past couple weeks while I’ve been on my “owl nap” break.
The topic I hear about more than anything else when I work with people regarding life and nature, plans and dreams, is: Time.
Time: Not enough of it. Too much to get done within it. Wishes for more of it. Stress at its limits. Bewilderment or grief about its fast passing.
I’m here to make a bold statement, and invitation:
You can shift your experience of time, without having to buy into society’s preoccupation with efficiency and productivity. And, without entering the arena of “AI hacks” to your life, or solving a quest for the perfect planner.
I invite you to let yourself step to the side of all that, even if the stepping is temporary, even as we each have to move back into the calendar world according to the shape and patterns of our respective lives, goals, and values.
I can’t do it for you, and neither can nature. But I can also guarantee this: If you explore with a light touch a few forms of sensory-rich attention with nature, and you do this at regular intervals in your life, you will develop the superpower of bending time.
Are you game to join me in this experiment and exploration? Let’s dig in!
Cheers,
Jennifer
Founder, Ordinary Nature
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Weekly Reflection 🦉
- Weekly Practice 👁👂👐👃
- Tidbit of Wonder 🌿
- Little Tender Things 🥀
- Survey Winners! 🎨
WEEKLY REFLECTION
Time Bending in Shrub-Steppe
Jennifer Ruth Keller
I move in silence up the path, open my ears to what stirs around me. I’ve walked the hundred or so yards before many times, a gravel trail through the shrub-steppe landscape surrounding the mostly-urban population hub I live in.
Today, I taunt myself with how slow I can move along the path. A dare without edge, more whimsy than risk. With each step the perceived silence changes. The slight crunch of boots on crushed rock. The breeze through brush. Birds calling out to each other–and maybe to me?–to alert their companions of my presence.
I scan, and look. Listen, and touch. Fingers and nose to sage brush, the recent rain has released a balm of scent on the clean air. Technicolor lichen dots gnarled bark, the orange and yellow bursts pop against the low cloud sky.
How long does it take me to walk the hundred or so yards? I have about an hour to wander, and have already lost track. As the path reaches a juncture, where you can choose which direction to go, to traverse a loop around the watershed area, I pause.
Instead of continuing on the loop path, I decide to meander in the area by the juncture, let myself be drawn along a visceral, if invisible, thread of sensory connection. What or who might call to me, present themselves as company?
Creek water gurgles through grass by my feet. Russian olive trees choke the bank. Birds flit and fly tree to bush, bush to tree. My senses dilate, I loosen into being with everyone rather than looking at everyone.
Usually, I’d try to make my way around the loop trail, still easy to do in an hour without rushing. Today, I release the plan. My boots toe the soft dirt, I crouch down to the water, let the wet grass slip by my hand.
Eventually my mind shifts to a different region, remembers time, wonders whether it’s getting close to when I have to head back to my car so I’m not late to the next thing in my day. I pull out my phone, glance at the clock feature. “Whoa,” I say under my breath, when the pixelated numbers indicate I’ve been out almost an hour.
How did that happen? I look around, the spell broken. I don’t want to hurry, but also don’t want to be late. I turn around, find the path back, and aim for a pace that’s swift without rushing, steady without shifting right back into what I call “blur walking.”
“Blur walking” = Productive movement rather than immersive motion. The blur of moving through space while I remain in my head, separate, noting my surroundings, but moving too fast to let them seep in. Or the blur of walking too fast to relinquish the control required for letting my presence be experienced by the landscape just as I open into its folds and fissures.
For many of us–myself included!–much of life, maybe even most of life, can become blur walking.
My invitation to you, to myself, this season and beyond: What if I interrupted blur walking more often, and explored what happens when I commit to immersive presence? What if I tried it once a week? Once a day? Every hour or so?
Let’s dare ourselves, and see how far we could bend time within our lives. Not to escape the realities (and gifts!) that can come with the “calendar world.” But to open to another possibility, one that adds dimension and spaciousness to daily life.
WEEKLY PRACTICE (and beyond!)
One of the quickest, most visceral ways to cut through “time stress” or “time preoccupation” or “the felt squeeze of time” is to immerse yourself in delight and curiosity.
We can slip into self-forgetfulness–and time-forgetfulness!–when we become enchanted with something outside ourselves.
Now, we can’t really plan enchantment and delight. They arise.
BUT we can place ourselves in circumstances, with a kind of mental and psychological positioning so as to allow occasions of delight to enter, rather than be thwarted.
HOW: Kind of like making a new friend. We show up. We get out of the way. We release our own story. We open to what is offered. We listen, we watch with a gentle touch, we sense the energy at hand, we are with them, receptive.
We let ourselves be open to impromptu discovery, and arrival.
Like pelican magic.
It won’t happen every time necessarily, but any time we move in nature, as nature, with immersive, sensory-rich motion, something will occur, some small enchantment will aid your self-forgetting, and you will be nourished, and time will suspend.
Tidbit of Wonder
Did you know hummingbirds are basically air-in-motion?
“Their bodies are filled with air sacs, which originate in, and function, in part, as extensions of the lungs. No fewer than nine of these filmy bladders fill the tiny body of a hummingbird: one pair in the chest cavity; another under each shoulder blade; another pair in the abdomen; one under each wing; and one along the neck.” Sy Montgomery
How cool is that?!?
Highly recommend this gem from Sy Montgomery:
- small size = fits in purse or bag for on-the-go delight
- highlights amazing people as much as amazing birds
- her curiosity zings on the page and will spark your own
LITTLE TENDER THINGS
Oh freezing rain, you fickle visitor.
Please encase me in delicate, frozen rapture,
without causing collapse, or breakage.
Preserve me. Suspend me.
Stop time,
you icy winter ghost.
SURVEY RESULTS & WINNERS!
Thank you to readers who filled out the survey last season, as I learn how best to support your nature explorations this year. Jessica, Kya, Jamie, and Jeni — I’ll be sending you a Beam nature-pigment paint card this month!
They are super cool because you can slip them in your backpack and paint in a nature journal in the park, on the trail, or wherever you’d like to experiment with color. [I had a little initial glitch with the survey form, so if you filled it out and I didn’t name you here – please email me and I’ll add you to the paint list!]
