Spiral Time
I was first introduced to the idea of spiral time by a witchy friend. She spoke of Spirit as a great teacher who brought experiences to us again and again until we learned to relate wisely to the situations that once challenged us. This friend described life as a labyrinth—as you walk into a labyrinth you are always in the neighborhood of your earlier steps, and there’s no way out of a labyrinth but to follow your own breadcrumbs.
It’s a common enough understanding these days, easily Instagrammable. Somehow though, I’d not translated this idea from the realm of the psyche to the realm of the tangible. While I looked at my internal development—my capacity to be more fully human— through a revisionary, iterative lens, I still measured my output linearly. A project that takes five years takes too long; a project that I set aside for two years is an abandoned project; a project that I complete only for myself is a waste of time. I expected each step to be both a step forward to something new and a step away from what came before, even though my life has never worked that way.
I owe a big shout-out to Marta Rose, of Divergent Design Studios, whose free pdf on what she calls “neuroemergent time” jolted me awake. She writes of time as a spiral—imagine the way you circumambulate the center of a labyrinth—and she encourages her readers, when evaluating progress, to , “Seek higher ground—vantage, not advantage.”
Yes! I know something about vantage points. The most stunning ones I’ve encountered I accessed on foot, and I experienced them either alone or with just one or two other people. It’s hard work getting to higher ground, and what one finds there often isn’t easily translatable.
One gift of a good vantage point is awe, which I wrote of last month. I love the idea of being in awe of my own efforts. Not of my output, but of my process. That project I set aside two years ago gets recycled into today’s work in a magical way only I may ever know.
There’s a labyrinth at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico, that I’ve been lucky enough to walk several times. I’ve walked it slowly, checking out the clouds and the placement of the stones along the way, and I’ve walked it swiftly, with the goal of getting to the center and getting out so I can eat dinner. The first approach gifts me vantage, the second advantage.
I did not plan to write this first post for the time divergent on International Workers’ Day. Our modern, western conception of time is linked to the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. Without the labor activists honored on May Day, we wouldn’t have weekends, or mandated lunches and breaks, or eight-hour workdays, or minimum wage. None of this is enough, and many people don’t even have these things. The fight continues, and so much of the fight is about time—how it is measured, how it is valued, who is in control of it.
What Marta Rose describes as spiral time seems to me the difference between a labyrinthine, meaning-oriented understanding of my tangible contributions to this life and a capitalist, linear, goal-oriented one. Both matter to me. I need to make money. I also know that I will die—nobody is getting out of here alive—and I want to meet my death having befriended the marvel of my own life.
