The healing of our world entails a wider perspective on time. To take part in the Great Turning, we liberate ourselves from the short-term thinking that drives the industrial growth society. Moving beyond anthropocentrism, we learn to "act our age," and experience the vitality of our interdependence with past and future generations.
"Deep Time work" refers to an expanding body of exercises that refresh our spirits and inform our minds by bringing them into larger temporal contexts. See Chapter 9 of Coming Back to Life. This work brings us both immediate gladness and lasting resilience.
- The Relevance of Deep Time (selections from Coming Back to Life, Chapter 9)
- To Reinhabit Time (Chapter 20, World as Lover, World as Self)
- Some readings:
- "Lifting the Veil," by Peter Forbes, Part One, pp 27-41, Coming to Land in a Troubled World, (2003, Trust for Public Land)Time and the Art of Living, Robert Grudin, selected passages (2002, Harper and Rowe)
- "Momo, Dogen and the Commodification of Time," by Linda Goodhew and David Loy
- "Voices from the Future Time," by friends of Joanna Macy (Journal of Traditional Acupuncture)
- Prayer to Future Beings
The Relevance of Deep Time (selections from Coming Back to Life, Chapter 9)
People of today relate to time in a way that is surely unique in our history. The technologies and economic forces unleased by the Industrial Growth Society radically alter our experience of time. It is like being trapped in an ever-shrinking box, in which we race on a treadmill. The economy and its technologies depend on decisions made at lightning speed for short-term goals, cutting us off from nature's rhythms and from the past and the future, as well. Marooned in the present, we are progressively blinded to the sheer ongoingness of time. Both the company of our ancestors and the claims of our descendants become less and less real to us.
This peculiar relation to time is inherently destructive of the quality and value of our lives, and of the living body of Earth. And it will intensify because the Industrial Growth Society is, in systems' terms, on exponential "runaway"--accelerating toward its own collapse.
Even as we see its consequences, we must remember that this relation to time is not innate in us. As humans we have the capacity and the birthright to experience time in a saner fashion. Throughout history, men and women have labored at great personal cost to bequeath to future generations monuments of art and learning, to endure far beyond their individual lives. And they have honored through ritual and story those who came before
To make the transition to a life-sustaining society, we must retrieve that ancestral capacity--in other words, act like ancestors. We need to attune to longer, ecological rhythms and nourish a strong, felt connection with past and future generations. For us as agents of change, this isn't easy, because to intervene in the political and legislative decisions of the Industrial Growth Society, we fall by necessity into its tempo. We race to find and pull the levers before it is too late to save this forest, or stop that weapons program. Nonetheless, we can learn again to drink at deeper wells.
To Reinhabit Time (Chapter 20, World as Lover, World as Self)
Both the progressive destruction of our world and our capacity to slow down and stop that destruction can be understood as a function of our experience of time.
We members of post-industrial societies in the closing years of the twentieth century have an idiosyncratic and probably unprecedented experience of time. It can be likened to an ever-shrinking box, in which we race on a treadmill at increasingly frenetic speeds. Cutting us off from other rhythms of life, this box cuts us off from the past and future as well. It blocks our perceptual field of time while allowing only the briefest experience of time.