Oh hi friend! Apologies for my delayed correspondence… (a phrase I find myself typing frequently.)
I think it’s safe to say that I suffer from some serious Time Blindness. I could have sworn we just completed our creativity challenge a week ago, but apparently it’s been 5 weeks. HA. How’s it going? Did you create something?
Here are the links to the challenge in case you missed it:
Initiation
Day 1: AIR
Day 2: WATER
Day 3: FIRE
Day 4: EARTH
Below is some work I created featuring my inspiring friend Amy Robison, a fellow photographer and creative who brought some totally new and bizarre things out of me in our collaboration together.
I’ve been reflecting on how working with others impacts my creativity and molds and shapes the result in fascinating ways. This intertwining of creative energies seems to be a totally subconscious and metaphysical process. It doesn’t always feel like a conscious choice, but every little nuance of the other person enters the field and shifts the direction a little bit this way and a little bit that way, especially since Amy and I have been internet friends, watching and being inspired by each other’s work for a good long while.
Amy suggested we meet at Hollywood Cemetery and showed up in this stunning vintage family heirloom of a dress. I showed up with my camera, a clock and a vague idea of having her ride on “The Veil.”
I see “The Veil” as the thick, disorientating fog of confusion that exists between the seen and the unseen. If you’ve ever tried to bring a concept from your imagination into form, you probably know what I’m talking about.
On the other side of the veil are the thought-forms and memories of our ancestors, the infinite potentialities of our future self, the ideas and imaginings of our collective unconscious.
I spend most of my time floating in imagination. It’s where I’m most comfortable and why I also spend the majority of my time alone. It takes enormous effort to bring my inner world out to be shared with another person, like swimming through mud. Forming my ideas into words is a slow and arduous process, both in writing or in conversation.
Existing in this imaginative realm certainly leads to complications and as I mentioned above… some serious time blindness. Entire days go by before I realize what happened. Weeks go by before I complete certain tasks that take only hours. It is a blessing and a curse. Blessed with more creative imaginings than I could ever actualize, and cursed with a degree of disconnection to the physical world, including often times, my own body.
But I think time blindness also offers a valuable perspective.
Time, as a social construct, is a horizontal linear trajectory from past to present to future. But life, as a spiritual endeavor, is more like a vertical spiral that looks like a circle from where we stand. The imaginative realm is only interested in the latter, and therefore the amount of time that passes is only measured in how much internal evolution and change has occurred. Weeks full of massive shifts feel like years and months full of small daily routines feel like days.
This is also interesting to consider in the context of the ever-imminent “singularity” and what feels like the speeding up of our collective sense of epochal time, years of collective evolution happening within weeks due to the technological tools we now have at our disposal.
It’s all fascinating and terrifying to be a part of, and I’m grateful to be surrounded by creative people who can make the most of the time and tools we’ve been given.
When we lose access to one of our senses, the others become heightened.
What is heightened when we lose our sense of time? Presence, perhaps, and an expanded perspective? Maybe we gain insight into the mythology of our personal history beyond our own lifetime. Maybe we allow our lineage and future self to access our current consciousness, to come to us in dreams, visions, and visitations.
When’s the last time hours passed without you noticing? What were you doing? Maybe do more of that.
In love and inspiration,
Sarah