Time Coil

I can't really say anything on the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and now nuclear reactor emergency. That's probably because no one else is really saying anything. I mean, did the US fly emergency coolant for the reactor out to Japan or not? Sources disagree. Was that really only slightly radioactive hydrogen coming off the first explosion? Is a third reactor at Fukushima in the meltdown process? Or are the professional scoffers closer to correct when they opine that there's nothing to worry about? Not that I believe that last point in the slightest, mind you - professional skeptics and wannabes have a cool, unperturbed exterior to live up to - even if they die implementing it.

No, the thing is that I don't know who to trust in these matters anymore, when it comes to news services. So, I'm just sitting back and waiting. I'm not unperturbed, but I'm pretty helpless when it comes to information right now.

So I've been thinking about the land, and time, instead.

I have listened carefully when representatives of indigenous cultures explain the two-way conversation between humans and the more-then-human world, which includes, to a high degree, the actual locus of the human and more-than-human life. They are truly interwoven in these natural human cultures - landbase and life, each giving to and taking from the other in a way of Being which civilised humans seem to have forgotten. Pre-alphabetic and truly interdependent, it seems to me that this is how we are supposed to Be in the world. Time, in such a state of being, is circular. What happens doesn't just happen once, but over and over, in a perfect circle echoing the sun and moon and wheels of stars; the rotation of the seasons and the round of  life.

Then again I have listened carefully to the almost transhuman gurus of evolutionary spirituality as they hold forth on the pressing need for humans to become- to evolve, to move onward and upward in some sort of grand transcendental progression which is more nearly linear than circular. Or maybe helical, but the spiral always moves on up. Towards an imagined singularity which humans have been striving for since first they incarnated upon the earth plane. Linear -or maybe spiral- time is the mode, in this way of thinking. Archaic is a regression, and people have grown out of needing to converse with the earth and the other life forms which share it.

Oddly, I can subscribe to both ways of thinking and doing. Holding them in tension as polar protagonists and thereby creating the middle pillar which more closely resembles Being and Becoming as it is - or, at least, as I see it, feel it and imagine it. The middle way is not frequently at either of these two poles, nor does it inhabit some median ground between them; but in action reminiscent of the smearing of quantum possibilities it fills this space between the poles, never quite to be pinned down to any given position.

So - time. Like a spiral moving around a central, linear axis. Both going forward and returning ever to the same path. And -who knows?- perhaps this coil-enwrapped one dimensional line is itself curved into higher dimensions, hidden from our incarnate eyes.