Turmoil & Time Suspension
Greetings Reader,
If you are reading this, and live in the U.S., I want to preface this week’s offering by saying that I do mention the events of the last week, in Minneapolis, because, for me, they can’t not be integrated. And also, if you are needing to select when and where you intersect with recent news, I wanted to give you some notice, so you can decide when to engage with my approach here.
For now, I’ll say I’ve done my best to create something that doesn’t look away, while also offering something that offers branches for being with the world as it as, and as it could be, if we open ourselves to each other and to the imaginal spaciousness of the natural world. (Which, of course, includes us human mammals.)
Cheers,
Jennifer
Founder, Ordinary Nature
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Weekly Reflection 🌿
- Weekly Practice 🌲
- Time Travel Book Rec ⏰🚀
- Little Tender Things 🥀
WEEKLY REFLECTION
Turmoil & Time Suspension
Jennifer Ruth Keller
Last Friday the weather forecast showed the icon that had gone missing for several weeks: a yellow-orange sun, and nothing else. We’d had weeks of grey sky, the inversion layer of the Columbia Basin taking hold with dogged persistence. At last, a reprieve, just in time for the weekend.
Saturday we woke to an electric blue sky, the wash of sun an instant balm. My light box had been working over-time in January, its antidote to the absence of sun weakening with every overcast day. Five minutes of blue blasted away the fog, within and without.
My daughter was sick, so I toggled between raking pine needles in the back yard, basking in the sun, and making quick trips indoors to tend to her strep throat ailments. I didn’t know if the sun would last more than a day, so I wanted to soak up as much as I could.
As we know now, the sunlight didn’t last.
While I was out beneath my beloved pine trees, doing my best to take in the rays that might kick start my body’s Vitamin D production, halfway across the country the sun bore down on a very different scene, as Alex Petti was shot while moving to assist a woman during their protest of the administration’s violent tactics and military-style presence in Minneapolis.
Both events—the sun’s return, the killing of Petti–-are time-stopping, time-suspending, time-blurring. We might experience them as broken out of normal time. We might experience them as having a time-blur effect—in the one case, we might lose track of time as we savor the flow state of time outdoors in the sun. In the other case, our attempts to understand may get us caught in a mental whir of distress, outrage, anxiety, or looping questions.
The crack in time from the blast of sun, or from the shock of the shooting, characterizes the intense juxtapositions of the world we live in. The brilliant blue between pines is set against the ugly, stark injustice of the killing on a sidewalk in a city.
The word I have kept coming back to, in what I witness (near and far), in how I sense my body responding, is “turmoil” – “a state of great disturbance, confusion, or uncertainty” (Oxford Languages Dictionary via Google).
Living amidst and within turmoil calls us to access and embody specific skills, forms of thinking, and motions of the heart. As we each discern what those are for our particular set of circumstances, I’ll offer this:
We don’t look to nature to evade the turmoil, or for quick answers, or to regard it as “ours” to help us get through.
We open ourselves with/in nature because, if we listen, and receive, we might de-center ourselves enough to sense into a broader order, a way of co-belonging, to start making something different for our shared world. W
WEEKLY PRACTICE
For this week’s practice, here’s a 3-minute video guide.]
Time Travel Book Rec ⏰🚀
I heard about this book from Amrita Bhohi who is facilitating a monthly reading group weaving in and through the field of spiritual ecology.
Rob Hopkins’ latest book is a fantastic exploration of how imagining a thriving future world—made in creative collaboration with others—is how we can (and must!) re-orient ourselves in an era of climate doomsday predictions.
He argues we can’t relinquish the distinct human ability to imagine future worlds to the deluge of fear surrounding nature’s demise and climate crisis. How to Fall in Love with the Future is a rousing, inspiring re-set of how we can entrust our imagination to conceive of–and build–a different future for ourselves and our children.
Recommended Book:
How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World, Rob Hopkins
(*legal note: supposedly I make a tiny % of books sales through this Bookshop.org link and I have to disclose that. But, really, I curate the shop there in order to have all the recs in one non-Amazon place.)
LITTLE TENDER THINGS
Hello quarter moon,
are you here with the sun
to bear witness
and share light?
We need you.
We need you.
Have a “little tender thing” you’d like to submit and share?
Let me know!
