Beside Time We Make a Circle {January 2023}

NON-LINEAR TIME  •  TOGETHERNESS MAGIC  •  BOUNDARIES

We open this year by opening a circle. 

This is a calendar of spells, but not small spells like our previous calendars. This spell is a big one, nothing less than to help us find safety and connection through the uncertainty of global change. Each month we will turn a calendar page together and connect to these images, these words, and let ourselves steep in them like a hot bath. We may be in different places, we may never meet, but we are doing this together. It’s a slow, slow form of time-based art, a broad and diverse circle of support, a prism that focuses light and sends rainbows out in all directions. 

We’re so glad you’re here with us.  

This first spell calls on us to make a space protected from linear time. A sanctuary, a place “beside time.” But what does that mean? And how do we do that? 

First, let’s imagine it. Where does your mind take you when you imagine you are sitting beside time? Maybe a still place when the wind is blowing everywhere else. Or a quiet place within the noise. A profound experience of slowness, as though your awareness of the micro-nuances of your existence has expanded exponentially. A place where the light looks different … 

Where did you go? What did you imagine? Wherever you went, we hope you’re all imagining that we are here, together. 

It matters that we are sitting beside time and not just outside of it. We remain in relationship with time, and with the parts of us steeped in the past, anticipating the future, humming along in the present moment as it keeps moving. Outside of time is unmoored, ahistoric, a Platonic ideal. But being beside is a friendlier relationship with time. We feel gently removed from the chugging hustle and pressures of time, but we’re not rejecting it. And it is here that we cast a circle. 

Circles are amazing. Cycles make circles, our field of vision is a circle, the amygdalas in our brains are soothed by circles—that’s right, our brains are wired to feel safe when we see circles. Circles are both an easy shape to comprehend (unlike a dodecahedron) and convey a sense of what’s hardest to understand: infinity. Casting a circle is a way of drawing a line of distinction between what is inside and outside. It’s a temporary space of protection and invitation. In this protected space, we call in our beloved visions for the present, the past, and the future. We recognize our resistances, and feel where we may be hardened by unexpressed grief. We see butterflies against the snow and think: How beautiful. How terrible. Will they survive? And non-linear time answers: They already have and nothing will. Non-linear time expands bubbles of possible futures, buoyant and bright, precarious and ever-shifting. It puts its arms around us as we sit beside each other. It invites us into collaboration.