Here for Whole Time

Joy Harjo and the poetry of generations

Dear friends and readers,

It’s been two years since I conceptualized the Wanderlife project and sat down to write a manifesto for liberating the spirit and lighting up the brain. Two years is nothing, but two years contain a lot of days and minutes and moments and ideas and experiences and changes. As I explained to myself and ‘the world’ in those initial posts, having a birthday at the deadline of the calendar year is convenient for exercises of self-reflection, intention-setting, and bold declarations. Starting out, I wanted to stay present through my 49th year leading up to a full half-century in a breathing body. So from the beginning, I’ve been inspired by the passing of time.

“What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude.”

- Mary Oliver

One of the boons of writing publicly in the modern world, ie on the internet, is the way writers’ words interact and feed each other. Turns out, there are many of us here, tugging at the threads of our lives until they take on a shape that is namable and describable in words that connect singular thoughts with larger human thoughts.

The project has loosened in the last year, as I’ve rolled over the hump and into my 50s, but the fascination with time continues. During the Winter Solstice weekend, a notification on my Substack app pinged to alert me that the wonderful writer, Julie Gabrielli, had re-shared something from Wanderlife. “Jessica Becker’s desire to write comes from a desire to slow time down enough to process what she’s seeing and experiencing,” she said. How lovely it is to be seen. And to have another writer understand what is happening with such clarity and insight.

And truthfully, I had just been thinking about time again. Whole Time.

On the first day of Solstice, I was out walking on frozen water under a grey sky that suddenly split open to reveal the infinite blue that is always there and a poem landed. This is rare for me, but I’ve heard it happens sometimes. When it happened, I was visiting the waters of my neighborhood, as I do, to say hello and express my thanks, as I do. I’d wanted some quiet time alone to be with the reality of the shifting light and the passage of time.

“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.”

- Leonard Cohen

It’s been said that Einstein’s theories reimagined the reality of time to reconnect with what Minister King called the “long arc of the moral universe.” The modern, rigid commitment to constructs like deadlines and the forty-hour work week creates a mind that struggles to grasp the Theory of Relativity, but I’ve heard it explained as a way of restoring time to the heart of nature, where it has always been in human cultures. Time is seasonal, cyclical, generational. Explained through all the religious traditions, the time/space continuum is what we are born into and leave into.

“At the 50 year mark, you know you’re starting to head out the other way and are once again closer to the that kind of knowing and awareness sometimes called wisdom, wisdom beyond and much larger and more immense than earth mentality.”

-Joy Harjo

Joy Harjo is a musician and poet. She was the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States and has written many books, including memoirs about her life growing up in at the end of the Trail of Tears in Oklahoma as a member of the Muskogee Creek Nation. Her most recent book is a Young Adult book, a version of her 2021 memoir Poet Warrior, called Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age. I’ve been getting to know more about Harjo because the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, where I work, is hosting her in Madison and Milwaukee in May. It’s a big deal! (For local readers, tickets go on sale January 12th and I want to plug becoming a member of the Academy, which will get you a subscription to the magazine I edit, Wisconsin People & Ideas, and a discount to tickets).

Krista Tippett interviewed Harjo in 2021 as part of the The On Being Project. A snippet of the interview was re-shared recently with a mind-bending exercise to bring oneself into “Whole Time,” a term Harjo uses in her writing. Tippett explains that our Western concepts of time have been hardened into constructs that make us forget the bigger perspective and deeper reality. She offers a way to move outside those constructs.

“Practice knowing in our bodies and our minds time as a more generative canvas and companion on which we carry and confront and inhabit and work with the hardness and sacredness of what we have before us.”

-Krista Tippett

The exercise Tippett shares to make time more spacious is this:

• connect first with your earliest memory and visualize the oldest person who held you as a very young person…

• think next of the youngest person you have held in your arms and envision them aging into the future…

• then figure out what year the oldest person who held you was born, as well as the year that baby you held may die (knowing that life expectancy is projected to be about 100 for the babies of the newest generation)…

• see and feel yourself held in this continuum…

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Maybe that’s a good place to end/begin. I am so grateful to you for wandering with me here and wish you a beautiful transition into the new calendar year. May there be time for a bit of reflection, time to pay attention, time to say what you need to say and do what you need to do, and time to celebrate!

To quote myself from the Wanderlife About page:

“Truly, this is some hard shit we are living through here on planet earth. Yes, and the world is stunningly gorgeous. People are ridiculously kind, silly, and creative. I’ve found that what catches the sunlight in a particular moment might just change my mind forever. Friendships are worth it, art is worth it, and I want to live my life believing that every trailhead is an invitation.”

Happy New Year!

sincerely,

PS: Thank you for clicking the heart and sending your sweet notes and leaving comments. It means a lot to me!