Grief as Time Travel: Letting the World Live and Linear Time Die

Resurrecting Embodied Time and a Future Sense in "the End Times"

Inside: Reflections on grief, senses of time, presence, and the future in the “End Times”, and meeting this moment with something beyond urgency and doom

Portrait of Urania, British School, 19th Century

Dear Shapeshifters,

I began Grief Spells as a time orienting practice.

I wrote these seasonal love notes to shapeshifters as a way to ground together in the seasons as they changed, to ground myself in the ecosystems I found myself in, to face the current shared moment - ecologically, socially, politically - with the resources of ancestral wisdom from plant kin, Tarot, astrology, and in relationship with ancestral seasonal celebrations and practices of time keeping, inspired by writers like

Amanda Yates Garcia

and Dori Midnight and their invitations to “re-enchant ancestral practices” (midnight).

I began Grief Spells as a time orienting practice because grief disrupted my experience of time and I needed new ways of keeping it. Grief slowed me down. It brought me back to my senses, to my own embodied sense of time, to the actual living world around me. My dad’s death also disrupted my sense of linear time, revealed to me the ways the veil between the realms of the living and the dead, the present and the past, permeate one another, move in various directions.

My grief awakened a deeper and wilder sensing of time than the one imposed on me, and facilitated a more enchanted and relational practice of time keeping. I learned that grief can remind us not only of time’s cyclicality, but of times’ embeddedness in place, in bodies: of flesh, of land, in enmeshed ecosystems, in relationship with others across space and time. Somehow, while forcing me to confront the reality of our mortality and endings, my grief also resurrected my connection to the future (which years of being in urgent movement work and attuned to ecological collapse had appeared to stamp out). This is because watching my dad die also taught me about a future beyond the self.

As we increasingly orient to the precarity and grief of our times, I am curious about each of you and your relationships with time.

How do you keep time these days?

And whether you’re keeping it or not, what’s your sense of time? As an actual sense, not what’s imposed on you. What shape is it? Where does it live? When did your understanding of time first fly away from place, from your own body’s rhythms and the plants and animals and stars and sunsets and rocks who stopped you in your tracks? How do you call it back? Or are your senses of time and place miraculously intact? or somewhere in between, reweaving themselves to one another? What brings you back to a more cyclical and embodied sense of time?

What’s your relationship to time? What slows you down? What do you do to kill time and why? And what kinds of things are you doing when you feel it slip through your fingers? When you feel it elongate? Is your particular flavor of neurodivergence the kind where you experience “time-blindness” - and are accused of “being in your own world” because you don’t adhere to a standardized notion of time?

What’s your relationship with the future like? the past? the present? How far ahead and behind you does time stretch? Does it ever stretch sideways? Does it loop back around, beneath, above you? Is it invisible? Made of light and breath? Can you hold it, or only behold it, like the colors of the sunrise and the stars above? Does it feel liquid, like ripples in a pond or the crashing waves on the shore? Or is it something solid, like the heart beating in your chest, a ripe fruit, the silver hair on your beloved’s head? How do you tell it?

Is it too late?

Joanna Macy asks us “What time is it on the clock of the world?”

And I worry that we just think it’s “too late.”

While it’s important for us to grapple with the ways that this particular moment does threaten so much of the life on earth to call ourselves into meaningful response with that loss, I worry that in the context of predominant linear stories of time, and Christian concepts of end of days, we have forgotten the shape of the clock is a circle and the shapes of our lives are within endlessly shapeshifting bodies.

Letting the World Live and Linear Time Die, Reconnecting with a Horizon Story and a Thick Present

Years ago, I wrote these paragraphs about a shared sense of linear progress getting disrupted by the death of a future:

“For the first half of our twenties, it felt as if we were approaching something, something magnificent, a revolution that might lead to thousands of small utopias, the end of capitalism and the state, and the slow cultural work of uprooting what hatreds it had left behind. A break in the system, a paradigm change, burned on the horizon like a bright orange sunset, inevitable.

That promising glow unveiled itself as an inferno by the time we were in our mid twenties. There was the end, in plain sight. A thousand ways to die loomed at the beginning and end of every day, inevitable. That did something to time. The future no longer stretched out before us, but dropped away like a curtain with nothing behind it. Its edges blackened and curled, and it fell like ashes from the smoky orange sky.”

I see the ways these sentiments are growing, as many decry that there is no future to plan for, there is only trying to survive, or trying to work some sort of miracle in these last moments of life on earth. These are important reckonings, and, I think they are the dying gasps of a particular set of stories - the stories of time’s linearity and our individuated selves and species. As someone who has worked as a caregiver for those at the end of life, as well as for those in life threatening mental health crises, I don’t see meeting this moment of our lives with a panicked, alone, futureless orientation really facilitating anything other than despair and an urgent grasping that will burn us all out, maybe before the apocalypse actually reaches us.

Our urgency, while often alerting us to what needs response, won’t necessarily save us. To respond to these ongoing unraveling times, we need each of us as resourced and connected to ourselves, our courage, and one another as possible - and that includes our connection to the glimmer of possibility of descendants and future kin.

So I hope these reckonings might move us towards a sense of time and self that is a bit more alive, multitudinous, mysterious, and embodied.

I was recently struck by Norma Wong’s call to reignite indigenous senses of time, and what she calls “a horizon story”. She shares:

“Almost all of the work that I do now… is what I would call unapologetically indigenous, which is to say that there was a time when all of the peoples of the world were indigenous…

One of the aspects of your indigeneity is that your sense of time was entirely different. You had a notion of rootedness, deeply in the past, so long ago that you would not remember the first ancestor. And you would have a sense of your responsibility to a future that is so far in the future, you know, you do not yet have numbers and names for the numbers of years and the names of the people that will follow…. And so that aspect of what it is that we had. I believe is an essential skill to reignite today, and that it is a human thing that we have forgotten.

I call it the horizon story. If we aren't just looking down at the ground, and if we look out… just standing tall with some pride, we could have a sense, actual physically embodied sense that there is not only a horizon, but something beyond it.” (How to Survive the End of the World Podcast with Norma Wong: When No Thing Works)

Norma Wong shared all this while also stating that she doesn’t know that humanity will survive these times.

How can we reconnect with horizon stories and what lies beyond them, when they might not actually be about us as individuals or even our species? How might these times call upon us to be students of embodied time, of horizon stories, and deeper presence, or at the very least to examine the stories we have about time and how they are playing out?

What if for example, instead of being fleeting and thin and urgent, the present is what Donna Haraway calls “thick”?

In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway shares:

“In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings…”

Sophie Strand

’s work has continuously inspired me in considering a future in which I am not the main character, or our species might not be, or what it means to be such “mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations” (Haraway):

“In an age when the Eurocentric fiction of individuality has deranged our ability to tend to the environments within which we are embedded, it seems important to soften our boundaries: intellectually and bodily. Horrified in the wake of two world wars, poet George Oppen mused, “Obsessed, bewildered / By the shipwreck / Of the singular / We have chosen the meaning/ Of being numerous.” Perhaps, realizing that we are constituted by webs of relationship, we must see the singular human species as a sinking ship. We must jump overboard into “being numerous”. Into being other species. Into being quite differently.” (We Must Risk New Shapes)

Along these lines, Bayo Akomolafe shares:

“The times are urgent; let us slow down. Slowing down is losing our way—not a human capacity or human capability. It is the invitations that are now in the world-at-large, inviting us to listen deeply, to be keen, to be fresh, to be quick with our heels, to follow the sights and sounds and smells of the world.” (Slowing down and surrendering human centrality)

For most of human history, humans kept time by listening to the more than human world, attuning our senses to place and the numerous bodies with whom we share it: observing, listening to, and consulting with bodies– celestial and earthly. Attunement to the placements of the sun and moon, the stars, the presence and life stages of other beings (the plants growing, fruiting, dying, the animals and their activity that season), and their own bodies was central. Keeping time was a sensuous, relational, and place based affair.

Today, there is so much grief connected to our experience of time. So many of us live with the dread of living in the “end times”, of everything being “too late”. So many of us are in despair, finding it hard to imagine living futures from within the ruins of massive ecological loss and state violence. And yet we rush around from thing to thing. Our grief is compounded because time feels scarce and our experience of it is mostly about not feeling, not attuning.

I wonder about how our grieving could disrupt all this, could lead us to “lose our way”, to “become numerous” in this “thick present” (Akomolafe, Strand, Haraway).

And I wonder about the stories that permit us to still find beauty in living and dying together. Are you finding them? Are you telling them?

May we tell time and stories in ways that allow us to become present to the numerous, numinous beings who are here with us, and to keep trying to feed the possibility of life beyond us.

With love,

Mara June

PS Part of attuning to my own rhythms has meant that I haven’t written so much this last month, and it has felt great. I have missed my “midweek enchantments” writing practice because I have been letting myself rest, take breaks, and actually just been letting myself get enchanted. I have been dreaming more, cooking more in community. I’ve been taking my own advice and rooting our creative practice in attunement to myself and others, with seasons and cycles of growth and decay, and trusting that all my subscribers won’t disappear simply because they haven’t received something in their inbox. So I thank all of you who are still here, reminding me that endless production is a myth we are composting.✨🍃

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Grief Magic: Time Bending, Shapeshifting, and Becoming Multitudes

For more explorations of grief as time travel…. our Grief Magic 2025 Cohort opens soon!

This yearlong creative cohort exploring themes around grief, magic, and shapeshifting in tune with the seasons and our bodies. Participants will explore their own processes of shapeshifting, magic, and story-telling, creating and sharing creative writing and art inspired by the themes we explore together.

Some of the themes we’ll be exploring:

• Ancestral Stories, Myths, and Timekeeping: Myths, Magic, and Folklore connected to the seasons and grief*

• Tarot’s Major Arcana as guides for grief and creative process

• Imagination Spells: Envisioning and Practicing Living Futures

• Art, imagination, and grief as collaborators and ecological processes

• Grief as Time Travel: Exploring constructions and experiences of space and time

• Grief, Shapeshifting, De/Constructions of the self: becoming multitudes

• The Politics of Enchantment: Mundane Magic, Care, and Enchantment in the Everyday

• Entanglement + Collapse: staying with the trouble of love amidst collective + ecological loss

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