Time, Time, Time
“It seemed to me that what perished need not also be lost” (Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson)
I am starting to replay 2025, as I often do at this time in the year. I suppose it is the changing season, although I have lived in places where that change is imperceptible if at all a reality. But my Northeast soul can never put aside these last months of a calendar year as a time to recall, to reminisce but more to take pause, a breath - not for any reason that I can discern except to contemplate the notion, I have long held, that time is fluid - that what we label as past, present and future are not at all conveniently marked, organized and put away as we might do with our last season’s clothes and garden tools - that past events never really perish. They are not done with us and we are not done with them. They echo, sometimes with the unwelcome ring of a remembrance that brings us to a dark or disagreeable or heartbreaking place we thought put away. Or - they renew us with moments forever imbued with grace and love and light.
One seemingly singular event experienced now - a birthday, a funeral, a marriage, an unpleasant or pleasant encounter with someone, the clearing out of items marked for donation, the quickness of a cat’s run, the moment of the sky right before rain, the smell afterwards of the lawn, the last tomatoes - are somehow never singular because it feels almost impossible to stop the torrent of associations that link together the events of our lives. We are not “either/or” creatures as much as we might like to be - there is a certain artificial, shallow and dissatisfying simplicity to “this or that” to “yes or no” - it is often an incomplete simplicity that, somewhere deep in us, we know not to be entirely true and whole.
It is in the thinking about the lack of depth that occurs for us in time when we “box” off our experiences and consign them to a past, present and future that Charles Taylor’s concept of “deep time” resonates. In his book, Cosmic Connections he explains “deep time” as not deep in “lower” than us spatially, but what he calls “a self-gathering pattern in time” - what “underlies” our sense of the surface. To be aware of the whole in a moment. As though time is no longer a variable in our existence, it pulls us neither into the past nor anchors us to the present nor flings us into an unknowable future. The scene depicted below is a place of “time gathering” exactly because time has ceased to become our human notion of existence set with beginnings and endings.
“Consider the following scene. I stand at the edge of the forest at dusk in late summer; I hear the wind shaking the branches as it moves through the trees; suddenly I feel a contact not just with this immediate scene, but the whole cycle of the seasons...I am carried beyond the immediate experience to a sense of the whole cyclical movement of the seasons which is the condition of life on our planet. I am in touch with a movement at a much greater depth and I rejoice in this connection.”
But there is an even more poignant dynamic at work in the sense of wholeness - it is that in which we, as individuals, are not only connected to nature’s cycle of seasons but we also experience a solidarity with the whole of our species. The cyclical nature of the seasons is a timeless metaphor for our own lives - from the implanting of a fertilized seed, protected and fed by nutrients, through the appearance of the shoot breaking out into the world, the time of growth into maturity, where buffeted by winds and threats, the life survives - long or short according to our own measure - until its physical death. It is the diversity of experience, our “lived time” that provides individual meaning but there is no escaping the life cycle of everything on this planet, including us. In wholeness we recognize this commonality - our individual impermanence - wrapped in timeless flow.
But I have digressed somewhat, from recollecting my year, into my continued puzzlement and fascination about time - and the placement of the individual pieces of our lives into this fabric. Well, perhaps that is it. We are pieces of this vast fabric, each of us, both graced and burdened with some measure of self-awareness - for since we cannot live anywhere but within time - we are bound here. This is perhaps our burden. But our self-awareness, our imagination, our sense of a connection with more than ourselves opens up a universe and, in this way, we might find ourselves graced and unfettered from our neat categories of past, present and future, we might find our way into a more significant lived experience in solidarity with both each other and our planet.
Lovely -
Susan, your piece sent me in this direction.
I've always been fascinated by the concept of time, which suggests that the past, present, and future happen simultaneously. T.S. Eliot mentions it in his Four Quartets. Eliot’s line — “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past” — captures something found in mystics, physicists, and poets alike: that time is both a medium and a mystery, through which the eternal continually breaks into the temporal.
The idea that past, present, and future exist simultaneously appears across many traditions. Christian mystics like St. Augustine and Julian of Norwich saw all moments as present to God in an “eternal now.” Eastern traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism describe time as an illusion, where each moment contains all existence — Dōgen’s being-time and Krishna as the embodiment of time. Modern physics echoes this through Einstein’s relativity and the “block universe,” where all events coexist in spacetime. Mystics and poets from Boethius to Blake and Rumi also envisioned eternity within the present moment. In modern thought, Paul Tillich and Carl Jung explored how the eternal now reveals itself in faith and synchronicity.
The older I grow — and I hope, wiser — the more I see how life is threaded with moments of synchronicity. They appear in conversations, in the strangers who cross our paths, and in the quiet intersections of meaning that seem too perfect to be a coincidence. Such moments often arrive unbidden, like grace, dissolving our ordinary sense of time.
We find it, too, in the familiar feeling of déjà vu — that mysterious recognition of something we have somehow known before, as though time folds back upon itself and we are momentarily aligned with a deeper pattern of being. It is as if pieces or portions of time, or of our own lives, are only a breath away — hovering just beyond perception, waiting to be remembered.
In poetry and prose, this same rhythm reveals itself: the instant when words meet the world in harmony, and we sense that something unseen moves through us. It is as if the veil between the visible and invisible grows thin, and we stand in one of those “thin places” the Celtic mystics speak of, where heaven and earth touch, and time itself pauses in reverence.
“Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.” Antoine Lavoisier