Deep. Time.
To think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its quick greed and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance, and legacy.
~ Robert Macfarlane
camino series, 3.
This series is inspired by Jerome & Kellie’s 500-mile trek on the Camino Norte in May - June 2024. We offer these reflections and videos for your own enrichment on the pilgrimage of life!
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with time, but our 36 days on the Camino made a deep deposit in moving my soul toward a healthier posture. The sheer simplicity of each day’s activities—walk, eat, sleep, repeat—was a gentle detox on my historical angst with time and productivity. It’s funny that my first book 20 years ago (Soul Space) was a manifesto of sorts for changing this complicated relationship, but I have to admit that this vision for freedom has been a slow burn in materializing. But now I have the Camino to thank for a strong boost in the right direction.
In the alternate reality of pilgrimage there are essentially no appointments, no projects, no deadlines, no rushing. Time itself seems to change its character, and we marked each day’s movement more by miles and sunshine and rumbling stomachs and tired feet than by hours and minutes. It was a much more grounded, visceral, harmonious partnership with our bodies and the world around us. Much more like our ancestors who lived closer to the earth. And I have to say that, for all its challenges, the Camino was a deeply healthy corrective to how I occupy my life now that I’m back in the realm of clocks and calendars.
As our video below hints, it’s a fundamentally different orientation toward each day, and it looks something like this:
I start with the conviction that everything that truly needs to happen today has ample space as long as I remain in the Flow.
I don’t place activities on my iCal now unless that activity is absolutely tied to the clock (like a coaching appointment).
I anchor each morning in a simple rhythm: vitamins, body prayer, water the plants, quiet time with Kellie. And out of that space, I carry a sense of what generally wants my attention in that day. Then I move into it.
I stop periodically to give thanks, to breathe, to perhaps engage the atmosphere exercise, to exercise, and to recalibrate my connection with the Flow.
When I lose my Flow (my connection with the Spirit), unrealistic expectations collide in an old familiar panic—It’s not getting done! It can’t possibly all get done! Abandon ship! But more often now, instead of getting wrapped around that rusty axle, I remind myself of the Grace that surrounds me, of my Belovedness, and of God’s ever-confident relationship with time.
It’s what we might call Deep Time. It’s the time beyond time. It’s the kind of time that God seems to occupy—never hurried, always secure, always holding our small crises within the larger perspective of eternity. It’s a nice place to hang out! And I’m trying to live there more often these days. I blow it regularly, but I’m also experiencing fresh grace and more joy. The Camino is a good teacher.
I also just finished a good book called Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation, by Cindy S. Lee, where she critiques our obsessive-compulsive orientation around linear time, how we treat it like a possession, how we prioritize instant gratification and nonstop action in our headlong rush to produce. It’s all an illusion, she contends, an illusion therapeutically addressed by the wise patience embedded in non-Western values of cyclical time, hospitality, and harmony.
Another practice that helps me reclaim a more balanced, life-giving experience of time is walking the prayer labyrinth. Not only is this act completely non-productive in the traditional sense, but it invites us into an embodied realignment with time. Oh horrors! The path doesn’t move in a straight line! No, it weaves sideways, then backwards, in circular motions until you’ve just about lost all sense of direction. But as long as you keep following that singular path, you can be absolutely confident that you will arrive at the center of its heart. Just like life. Measured by our skewed Western sense of time, God’s work is ridiculously inefficient. So maybe it’s “time” to ease into a new relationship with our minutes and hours and days.
growing your soul
You might want to experiment with a new practice I’m exploring and writing as I go. I call it the Locating Exercise, and it’s a work in progress. (But not linear progress, ha.)
serving our world
Back to the idea of hospitality—how might you make yourself more available to others as you let go of your compulsions around clock and calendar?
takeaway
Get in the Flow!
This week’s video
Our third photo/video collage from our 2024 trek of the Camino Norte, this one explores the theme of “Simplicity” as we look at what it means to “show up” and be fully present in our lives, whether on a 500-miles pilgrimage in northern Spain or on the journey of our real lives.