The Whole of Time





 So, with Joy (Harjo) as our teacher, I think we’re called to practice living in the whole of time; to 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 the sacredness of what we have before us; to reconcile on this kind of canvas who we want to be with the histories we’ve lived and told and the future we desire. On Being Podcast


I have always been fascinated by “time” and “imagination”. The former term gives me hope when I am able to expand my sense of it into a dimension of eternity which minimizes past, present and future pain and offers that “arc of justice” or in my configuration “arc of mercy” which not only consoles but transfigures current anxiety into deep compassionate hope.


To take that journey requires the second term: imagination. (not to mention faith!) When I was in 8th grade my history teacher returned a paper to me with a grade of A+ and proceeded to burst my overinflated bubble of accomplishment! She said it was perfectly factual and detailed and complete but it lacked imagination! She said she feared I had none!


Well you can imagine what this oldest Virgo child did: committed my life to finding my imagination and proving her wrong! It is a search which continues but has born some fruit after 60 years!!! In fact when I began to write regularly, with fear and trepidation, I named my blog “Blessing Imagination”, realizing that mine need not be a “perfect” voice, only an authentic one. 


So…time and imagination, imagination and time, bring me to this moment which is both an intersection of past and present and future and something more vast, more mysterious. Joy Harjo assists me in placing this tension infested intersection into a contextual vessel of hope. Her concept of “the whole of time” offers not just another perspective but an existential reality which causes my lens to expand beyond my navel to the world, to the universe. 


Now my imagination is engaged. I gently move out of my head and check in with my heart. In this whole of time space I imagine my ancestors, I embrace my children and grandchildren, and I experience a freedom of hope for them and for the universe. I am now very very small, as is my fear. Instead, I begin to realize a glorious expanse of color arching over the ocean, reaching toward…well, reaching into and through… a wholeness of eternal love and mercy and justice. The whole of time includes that other shore. Grace carries us there.


P.S. Wendell Berry also helped me get to this peaceful, hope-filled, wholeness:

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


“I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” For me this is an expression of the whole of time, grace and freedom. May that be all there is and may it be enough.


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