Hope Portal - The Whole of Time
(This is one of those “too long for email” posts - mostly because of the number of photos - be sure to click through to the site from the email to see the whole)
This week’s The On Being Project reflection on Hope centers on time through the life and wisdom of musician, visual artist, and poet Joy Harjo. Joy Harjo is a former poet laureate of the United States and is a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation. You can listen to the clips of her conversation with Krista Tippett here (and I highly recommend you do - it is so beautiful and so rich).
The concept of time is at the heart of the conversation between the two and how time is not as linear and literal as we like to think it to be. Not only has science shown us that time is a relative concept (thank you Albert Einstein) in that time slows down as one approaches the speed of light and speeds up the slower one moves. Time is also affected by gravity in that time is faster the further one is away from a gravitational pull. So, time moves faster for objects orbiting the earth than those of us walking on the ground. It is only fractions of seconds but it is enough that it has to be accounted for in the software of GPS satellites, for example. Ultimately, time is a relative concept based on the forces acting upon an object.
We also experience the relativity of time personally as well - time seems to speed up when we are enjoying something and slow down when something is more difficult. That may be more perceptive than “provable” but that is the experience that we have all had at times.
But the connection of time and hope is the reality that we don’t always see the results of our hope in the time that we have. We may plant the seeds of hope for ourselves, for others, or for the world as a whole but we may not see them bloom in full either for ourselves or for those beyond ourselves. As Gandalf said to Frodo in Lord of the Rings, “all we have to do is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.” In the song “The World Was Wide Enough” from Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton says, “Legacy. What is a legacy? Its planting seeds in a garden you never get to see.” In the OnBeing conversation, Joy references Martin Luther King’s famous idea of how the arc of history bends towards justice. The reality though is that if we are at one point on that arc, it is sometimes hard to see the full bend - we just see and experience that moment. She also references her experience as an indigenous person and how justice feels rarely in the moment but that, “her elders always believed that there would be justice: ‘though justice is sometimes seven generations away or even more.’” However, she still emphasized that this justice is ultimately inevitable. And of course, we have the words of Paul in Romans 8 where he says, “Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.” (Romans 8:24-25). However, I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t always (rarely) wait for hope with patience.
I found it interesting that this focus came up this week because I have had several reminders in the last 24 hours of connections across time. Yesterday, on my last Sunday before beginning at the new congregation I’ll be serving, I went with one of my daughters to the zoo. Interestingly enough, I saw in my journal that nearly a year ago, I wrote about how she and I went to the zoo as well. Here is a meerkat and one of the hippos from 2024 followed by them from Sunday.
As well, earlier on Sunday morning, I saw the first of flowers along one of our regular paths starting to bloom. I have grown to expect their emergence at this time every year but I cannot see them today without remembering how I was seeing them in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd’s murder and the exchanges that were happening at that time - some healthy and helpful and others not so much. I wrote at that time about how the conversations started small, like a few single blooms starting to emerge and then they erupted into wide-spread engagement. Here’s a post later in 2020 of my own “Psalm” about all the flowers, engagement, and conversations.
Here are a few of the flowers from 2020 and then the first of the blooms I saw on Sunday.
And notice how the same places look so different in the span of just an hour (or a few hours)
From Sunday 6am to Sunday 7am to Sunday 5pm:
And then, in just the span of an hour on Saturday morning - a vibrance of colors to simply golden light:
So this week, I’ll be centering on hope through the passage of time.
One practice I have shared in my contemplative photography groups is to be intentional about moments like these above. Actively pay attention (photographing or not) the same object or the same scene at different times throughout a day. What is the same through them, what is different, what is the quality of light early in the day compared to later? And then widen the reflection about your own life - what about the passage of time for you - how have you changed early in the “day” of your life to where you find yourself today?
Grace, Peace, Love, Hope, and Joy,
Ed
PS - Scout as a puppy and Scout a few weeks ago...look at those floppy ears from 2016!!!
💕