for years i can’t stop thinking about time travel, maybe its the minutiae of now and how in a single day the load of catastrophes we are witness to can stack so unimaginably high while we still do what we do to live. we wake up, drink water, move ourselves around, care, work, sleep. or maybe it is the nature of children who are at once eternal, bubbling, singing, screaching, climbing, and howling and also changing at the blink of an eye into something new, taller, more articulate, able to move in a new way .
or maybe it is because when i imagine the future of the world i feel like i just can’t. this might sound more hopeless than i mean it to, but when i think about time as it hurtles forward with both the miracles of living and the polycrises unfolding i cant imagine what it is. i think about time and remember it stretches in all the directions regardless of my tiny pinprick of imagination and there is some reassurance in this.
and then there is this element of being a human. small, permeable, susceptible to the winds of the world. i say this after spending nearly a month in bed with a surprise storm of being extremely sick. this kind of illness is in itself a time travel, what once made sense, felt urgent, had consequnce changes quickly to the real demands of a body that needs care.
all of these things are a kind of time travel, a disruption of the rhythm, a chance, a portal to some other kind of time. some other kind of being.
and in this time travel the wayposts are important.
there are many time signatures to learn to recognize
this kind of traveling is like learning music, it asks for prensence, patience, and practice.
it is-
the change in the green of the live oak outside the window.
the curl of fog sliding from 4:30 to 5:30 to 6:30 as the days grow long.
the tooth wiggling, then falling out, despite the braces. a visit in the middle of the night of a semi-magical canine obsessed fairy who carries around a lot of money
the anticipation for the first strawberries
the ache
the recognition of dreams pouring through like a water in a colander each night whether they can be caught or not
the recognition is the learning. the learning is the travel. the travel is the possibility made real. maybe we cant travel without the markers? maybe when we touch time it like so much else turns to dust and a huge gust of wind blows us and the time to somewhere new?
maybe this is how the future is imagined?