There exists only the present instant… a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.
Meister Eckhart
Imagine if your culture had such an understanding of Deep Time, the eternal present, the Now, that they used metaphors and language that were untranslatable for someone with a Western perspective. Like for the Amondawa Tribe, an indigenous Amazonian group, it wasn’t that they had no understanding of the abstract concept of time, or were without ways of telling the time, it was just that they couldn’t explain it in linear terms.
Kevin K. Birth calls such Western (im)perceptions ‘Time-Blindness’. Tyson Yunkaporta, as an academic, arts critic, and member of the Apalech Clan in Queensland, Australia, is able to straddle several cultural worldviews. In his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, he puts it this way:
Explaining Aboriginal notions of time is an exercise in futility as you can only describe it as “nonlinear” in English, which immediately slams a big line right across your synapses. You don’t register the “non” —only the “linear”: that is the way you process that word, the shape it takes in your mind. Worst of all, it’s only describing the concept by saying what it is not, rather than what it is. We don’t have a word for nonlinear in our languages because nobody would consider traveling, thinking, or talking in a straight line in the first place. The winding path is just how a path is, and therefore it needs no name.
Jenny Odell, in her book Saving Time, comments that the challenge of trying to conceive of time differently is urgent, ‘a matter of political and ecological import’:
Conceptions of time are deeply related to how and where we see agency, including within ourselves. They matter especially now, when the world calls out not just for action, but also a less human-centric model of who and what is owed respect and justice.
I wonder if it is also spiritually urgent that I understand how God is the ever-present Now who defies all understanding of time? To celebrate God’s action in entering time – in the earth-shattering moment of Incarnation – is to understand that before the Incarnation as well as after it, God is Timing – God is not the noun ‘Father Time’, nor is God a past tense. God is agency, a verb, animate: God Times.
I suspect that the Wise-Ones understood something of this mythic quality of GodTime, SpaceTime, DeepTime. And I would imagine that the route they chose to travel, arriving at what they came to understand was a pivotal moment. The birth of the ChristKing marked a fundamental shift in the nature of that GodTime. So I wonder if the Wise-Ones followed the equivalent of what psycho-geographers name ‘desire paths’, (paths made over and over by the passage of feet cutting a corner across the grass, say, rather than walking the other two sides on a pavement)? Desire paths in DeepTime might look like a legend soaked highway across the desert, bringing truth-seekers and time-travellers to worship the child who continues to defy definition over two millennia later.
In Tse’gihi,
In the house made of the dawn,
In the house made of the evening twilight,
In the house made of the dark cloud,
In the house made of the he-rain,
In the house made of the dark mist,
In the house made of the she-rain,
In the house made of pollen,
In the house made of grasshoppers,
Where the dark mist curtains the doorway,
The path to which is on the rainbow,
Where the zigzag lightning stands high on top,
Where the he-rain stands high on top,
Oh, male divinity!
With your moccasins of dark cloud, come to us.
With your leggings of dark cloud, come to us.
With your shirt of dark cloud, come to us.
With your head-dress of dark cloud, come to us.
With your mind enveloped in dark cloud, come to us.
With the dark thunder above you, come to us soaring.
With the shapen cloud at your feet, come to us soaring.
With the far darkness made of the dark cloud over your head, come to us soaring.
With the far darkness made of the he-rain over your head, come to us soaring.
With the far darkness made of the dark mist over your head, come to us soaring.
With the far darkness made of the she-rain over your head, come to us soaring.
With the zigzag lightning flung out on high over your head, come to us soaring.
With the rainbow hanging high over your head, come to us soaring.
With the far darkness made of the dark cloud on the ends of your wings, come to us soaring.
With the far darkness made of the he-rain on the ends of your wings, come to us soaring.
With the far darkness made of the dark mist on the ends of your wings, come to us soaring.
With the far darkness made of the she-rain on the ends of your
wings, come to us soaring.
With the zigzag lightning flung out on high on the ends of your wings, come to us soaring.
With the rainbow hanging high on the ends of your wings, come to us soaring.
With the near darkness made of the dark cloud, of the he-rain, of the dark mist and of the she-rain, come to us.
(from Washington Matthews, The Prayer of First Dancers:
“The Night-Chant: a Navajo Ceremony, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, 1902; ‘the prayer is addressed to a mythical thunder-bird, hence the reference to wings, though the bird is spoken of as a male divinity… The prayer is said at the beginning of work, on the last night of the Night Chant. The shaman speaks it, verse by verse, as it is here recorded, and one of the first dancers repeats, it, verse by verse, after him’; Tse’gihi: North of the San Juan River, in Colorado and Utah, are a number of canyons abounding in ruined cliff-dwellings. Tse’gihi is one of these canyons. It is often mentioned in the myths as the house of numerous gods who dwelt in the cliff-houses in ancient days. They are thought to still abide there unseen? The Night-Chant is a nine-day healing ceremony, ‘performed only during the frost weather, in the late autumn and winter months – at the season when the snakes are hibernating’.)
‘The Night chant: a Navajo Ceremony ‘
(Gigantic Cinema, Ed. Alice Oswald and Paul Keegan, 121-2)
desire path?
image into ikon 