What Shape is Time?

At last! Spring has officially begun (in the Northern Hemisphere). The seasonal wheel is turning toward warmth, light, and life renewed.

Did you ever ponder the shape of time? Is time an inexorable linear march, or a continually returning circular dance?

In synagogues around the world, spring brings a special reading from the Torah that includes these words:

הַחֹ֧דֶשׁ הַזֶּ֛ה לָכֶ֖ם רֹ֣אשׁ חֳדָשִׁ֑ים רִאשׁ֥וֹן הוּא֙ לָכֶ֔ם לְחׇדְשֵׁ֖י הַשָּׁנָֽה׃

This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months; it shall be the first of the months of the year for you. (Exodus 12:2)

That month is Nisan (around April), the ancient Hebrew and Babylonian lunar month of spring, in which Passover falls. If you are familiar with the Jewish calendar, you might be scratching your head, since Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, is seven months away in the fall.

But the Hebrew calendar has more than one new year, and it offers at least two shapes of time: linear and cyclical.

The notion that the Jewish people introduced linear time to the world was offered by historian Thomas Cahill a few years back in his bestselling book, The Gifts of the Jews. According to Cahill, human history truly began when God said to Abraham, “Go forth” (Genesis 12). Until then ancient civilizations looked at time and life like a big wheel: never ending, repetitive, with no room for individuality. Judaism gifted the world with the idea that tomorrow can be better than today, that each individual life has a purpose and goal, and that justice will someday be served, even if it be in some distant visionary future.

But there is another view which finds the sanctity of time not in linear progress but rather in sacred cycles. This position is articulated by Rabbi Arthur Waskow in his book Seasons of our Joy. According to Waskow, the shape of Jewish time is not a line at all, but round, like a circle dance. The sacred cycles of the year are tied to nature and the earth, to the phases of the moon and the textures of the seasons. To ensure our future on the planet, we must stop our obsession with mere material, linear “progress,” and return to our ancient appreciation of life’s cyclical rhythms.

I’m a both/and person when it comes to the shape of time: life is cyclical and we can grow and progress. I love an image offered by Rabbi Michael Strassfeld in The Jewish Holidays: A Guide and Commentary, describing the Jewish shape of time as a kind of rising helix, like the spiral ramp at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. We keep returning to the same lessons with the annual seasons and holidays, but each time we do it from a new vantage point that allows us a larger perspective.

And… here’s another way to view the shape of time: not as a line or even a cycle, but as an eternal present rooted in the landscape and the elements. According to David Abram, in his landmark book, The Spell of the Sensuous, many indigenous peoples sense that time is inseparable from place, with the future lying just beyond the horizon and the past hidden underground and inside of living things. I love to visualize time like that to keep me in the present (see the mini-retreat at the end of this post).

Time is life. In today’s world, with our ever-shortening attention spans pulled in a million different directions by our ubiquitous technology and media, time can often feel fleeting and fragmented. The ancients knew that time was sacred. By connecting with nature, with loved ones, with sacred days and moments, we, too can stretch and mold the shape of time into a sacred vessel of life.

Comment below: How do you sense time? Is it something that changes, and can you shape it?

Take a Mini-Retreat:

Consider author David Abram’s personal time exercise from The Spell of the Sensuous. Find a relatively open (and safe) space outdoors, Relax, breathe, and look around. Close (or soft-focus) your eyes, and imagine the past and future pouring into the present:

“[I] let myself begin to feel the whole bulk of my past—the whole mass of events leading up to this very moment. And I call into awareness as well, my whole future—all those projects and possibilities that lie waiting to be realized. I imagine this past and this future as two vast balloons of time, separated from each other like the bulbs of an hourglass, yet linked together at the single moment where I stand pondering them, And then, very slowly I allow both of these immense bulbs of time to begin leaking their substance into this minute moment between them, into the present.” (p. 202)

Slowly, the present moment will begin to grow and the past and future to dwindle to “mere knots on the edge of this huge expanse,” When you are ready to “let the past and the future dissolve entirely,” you can open your eyes and senses to the boundless vitality of the eternal present. If you wish, imagine the future is somewhere beyond the horizon, while the past is underneath the ground under your feet, and hidden inside of each living thing, including you. Immerse in being right here, right in the now.

Photos by me. This post is also found on my Substack: GPS for Your Inner Landscape.