Time Travel

an experience of the seasonal soul

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The Pond, June 2023 © Jan Blencowe

When you are living as a seasonal soul, closely attending to the particulars of the changing seasons, the year is like watching a movie you’ve already seen many times; you know what’s coming and how it ends. This foreknowledge gives you a kind of predictive power, a way to see the outlines of the future. Living the seasonal wheel with intention and attention fine-tunes your ability to know and understand what’s waiting to unfold. There’s a certain divinatory aspect to faithfully living and breathing the earth’s rhythms year upon year. You build a store of knowledge so vast that your comprehension of earthly reality expands to the point of “whole perception,” grasping a complete cycle in one thought, thus seeing, feeling, and knowing what a true year is. When this happens, you can call up the distinct felt sense of any given season or even month and experience it in the present moment, time-traveling in your inner sensing-self. Upon mastering this, you will find that it is only preparation for a much greater ability: traveling between realms through your inner being’s felt sense.

I sat outdoors the other day, immersed in a perfect June morning. The sky was endlessly blue, like a great, deep, clear lake of azure, its depths rising above me into eternity. Not a single cloud disturbed the endless field of tranquility above me. A gentle breeze, fresh and cool, tossed the new green leaves in the tree canopy, causing a soft, shushing sound to caress the air. This sound proceeded, a cascade of undulating soundwaves, sending a soothing softness into my whole being.

Everything about this moment was June. The angle of the morning sun, the quality of its light and warmth, the gentleness of the breeze, and the color of the trees. The Juneness could be sensed in all things. The fragrance of the air bore a hint of lilac and rose. The shadows in the woods were filled with flickering dappled light; birdsong wove a melody that surrounded everything in an invisible net of symphonic bliss.

I was lost in a reverie, thinking about the glories of June and feeling the expanding influence of the sun as it swells in these last moments before the summer solstice, now only days away, when I was surprised by the wind's sudden shift in direction. In that briefest of moments, I was catapulted as if through a portal to the last days of summer. I felt all the sensations of receding solar energy and wistful melancholy brought on by the dying summer and the encroaching bittersweetness of harvest. I was transported into another time of year. It was no longer mid-June, but mid-September, with its sad farewell to the summer’s fields of flowers and grief at the swallows’ departure. This, coupled with the anticipation of growing darkness, made the light of evening fires and winter holidays wholly real and immediate to me.

How could I feel so thoroughly there, at a different point in time, when just a moment ago I was completely present, enraptured with the season as it was in this moment?

September 2024, © Jan Blencowe

I’ve lived through many Junes and many Septembers and all the months and seasons in between. I’ve also paid attention, acutely, as that has been my temperament since childhood. Nature and the changing seasons have been a constant call and source of investigation, inspiration, and instruction for me.

A vault of memories of things observed, experienced, and felt in each season has claimed vast amounts of space in my heart, mind, and soul. So much so that the merest changing in wind direction and slightest momentary dip in temperature on a grand June day can instantaneously locate me in a different moment in time in a visceral and very real way.

It’s time travel, for real.

I can be in a different moment, lifted out of the restrictions of the density of material existence, because the power of attention over many years has sharpened my ability to “be there” uncoupled, unconfined from the boundaries of linear Time. This is not delusion or simply imagination. It is a real experience. I am at once here and there in time.

Of course, we are aware of this. It’s long been known that trauma is a problem because the brain (or we might say the soul, the inner being) revisits the trauma-inducing situation and experiences it as real and present, as if it is happening right now, not as an event in the past. Visualization and intention setting work like that in reverse. As we focus our inner being on creating a desired situation in those moments of deep focus (prayer or meditation), our entire mind, body, and soul respond as if that thing were already in existence right now. The lines between past and present soften because, in reality, past and present are concepts; the only fully experienced reality is the Now. Or is it?

Time itself is a construct, and I’m not sure that we understand it at any meaningful level, which is why I’m open to experiences like the one I had just a few days ago on a beautiful June morning, which turned to September.

I wondered why that experience suddenly came upon me. Was it a message? Did it have something to teach me? It’s always profitable to consider such events when they happen. Like remembering and unpacking your dreams, uncanny experiences often illuminate great truths that are important and beneficial.

The first thing that comes to mind is a reminder that time passes quickly, and before I know it, summer, though just starting now, will be over in the blink of an eye. This seemed an obvious message, but it was likely not the whole story.

Upon deeper reflection, I understood that this had to do with comprehension, the ability to apprehend things in their actual state. In every acorn, there is an oak; in every summer, there are ripening kernels of harvest and winter. In every human being, potential for higher levels of being in all realms, body, mind, and soul. What I am now is not what I will be, nor what I have the potential to be. Furthermore, in some way, just as I was able to perceive September in June, my higher self is already present in this reality, and some who know me best and love me dearly see that possibility and potential in me. Although that higher self may not be visible to many others, I’m certain those in the spirit realms know the reality of that me and are working in cooperation with Divine will to help me travel up the ladder of ascension towards the fullness of being and abundant life that is my portion.

It is experiences like these that nourish my soul and help me connect to the actual reality beyond this material world. It is so good and uplifting to be reminded that the cyclical progression of the year is given to help us understand the very nature of the reality in which we live. Over and over, season after season, we are instructed through glorious reminders in nature that we are on our way somewhere. We move through birth, life, struggles, sorrows, separations, grief, as well as joy, satisfaction, and abundant life, including the doorway of death along a path that leads upward.

The ability to perceive and comprehend the wholeness and trajectory of restoration that underlies our growing and decaying sojourn on this earth opens my soul to a knowledge that is truly comforting and exhilarating. That September is hidden within June, and June within September lays open the understanding that in life, there is death, and in death, there is life.

While the spiral goes round, the movement is upwards towards our true home and our final reward, and that, my friends, is an ever comforting truth to behold.

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