Welcome to Yard Dragon where I write about plants, spirit, and life in between.
I love when that one voice pops into my head. Maybe you know the one. I call it the guru self——a part of me that’s way wiser than everyday me. Everyday me inevitably gets caught up in minutiae, as we all do.
The voice barges in with one-liners here and there. Like my own personal Jiminy Cricket except maybe not as didactic. Sometimes the one-liners come in dreams.
Years ago, the dream was a dock over the ocean, a former student, and sea turtles.
The student said, “Dive in.”
“But I’m afraid,” I said.
“Don’t be afraid of what you can’t see,” he said. Suddenly the dark waters went clear, and sea turtles swam playfully below us.
I took that particular message to be something about how there is a certain wisdom to embracing the unknown, at a time in my life when everything was up in the air.
The other day, the voice came to me while I was doodling this and listening to Sigur Rós, a band I still love after all these years:
The voice said to me, “Give yourself the gift of time.” And I was like, yeah, okay, how do I do that?
Time is objective, right? You have it or you don’t? Twenty-four hours in a day, etc. etc. You have to go to work for a certain amount of hours, you have to walk the dogs, shop for/cook meals, sleep.
So, how to gift yourself more time?
Well, first, it’s not that “there aren’t enough hours in the day” but how we’re experiencing time, right? I mean, time is all about perception.
I edited a picture book manuscript a few years ago where the author was playing with ideas of time and relativity with regards to the protagonist who was a rock.
As I was thinking about how best to frame this rock’s experience of time, I went to general relativity and got myself confused about whether a rock, being slow, would experience time as if on fast forward or in slow motion. I.e., if the rock is stationery, what does the world look like buzzing along around it?
And, because I spent an hour or so this morning listening to Trevor Noah interview Sam Altman on his new podcast, I asked ChatGPT the following, “If a rock had consciousness, how would it experience time?”
Answer:
The concept of a conscious rock is purely speculative and not grounded in our current understanding of physics or biology. Consciousness, as we understand it, is associated with complex neural processes and information processing, which are characteristics of living organisms, particularly those with nervous systems.
However, for the sake of imaginative exploration, if we were to entertain the idea of a conscious rock, we might consider some aspects of how it could experience time:
Perception of Changes:
Consciousness often involves the perception of changes and events. If a rock were conscious, it might be aware of changes in its environment, such as weathering, temperature variations, or interactions with other objects.
Slow Perception of Time:
Rocks experience geological processes that occur over long timescales compared to the rapid changes perceived by living organisms. If a conscious rock had a subjective experience of time, it might perceive time at a much slower pace than organisms with faster metabolic and neural processes.
Unity with the Environment:
A conscious rock might feel a deep connection to its geological surroundings, experiencing a sense of unity with the Earth and the slow, transformative processes that shape its environment.
Lack of Biological Rhythms:
Living organisms often have biological rhythms, such as circadian rhythms, which provide a sense of day and night. A conscious rock, lacking biological processes, might not have such rhythms and could experience time more uniformly.
No Biological Aging:
Living organisms age, but rocks, being inanimate, don't undergo biological aging. A conscious rock might have a different perception of the passage of time, not tied to the aging processes that characterize living entities.”
When I asked, “If a rock had consciousness, how would it experience time in regards to general relativity?” the answer was fairly similar but couched in more scientific language like time dilation and relativistic effects. One major similarity is the notion of unity with the environment:
A conscious rock might feel a deep connection to its geological surroundings, experiencing a sense of unity with the Earth and the slow, transformative processes that shape its environment.
Or in its more relativity-based language, temporal unity with its surroundings:
The conscious rock might have a deep connection to the geological history of its surroundings. It could perceive itself as part of a larger spacetime structure shaped by the presence of massive objects.
A little bit off topic, but the idea that a rock doesn’t have a consciousness is both more Western and more modern than we like to admit. Animism has always attributed a spiritual essence, if not a consciousness, to inanimate objects. But, as I’m learning in my studies of the history of herbal medicine [read: medicine], we——us modern thinkers——really don’t give history or traditional wisdom much credit.
Anyway, I think we might all want to look into being conscious rocks, deeply connected to our surroundings, experiencing a unity with the Earth that can only occur over epochal time?
So how do we become more like a rock? How do we settle into this notion that time is not about seconds, minutes, hours but lifetimes, millennia, epochs?
Meditate, maybe. Be more aware, more present. Literally slow down. Like consciously slow down.
Working with plants, digging in the dirt, seems to do the trick, too. It’s as though the pulse actually slows down.
So, I’ve been starting to practice a bit, and I’m going to continue this practice through 2024. Let my year-of-slowing-down-time commence.
Anyone want to join me?
Lex