Timeless Rhythms of Wild Winter Wisdom
Exploring An Eternal Relationship With Time, In the Season of the Shortest Days
It’s been a minute, or 338,774. I’m back with notes and wonder from the field.
A musing and documentation of natural time at the river’s edge and riparian woods behind my home and studio.
This newsletter is art activism issued in devotion to a creative revolution.
The wood cutter, the baker and the writer are all chopping up their mediums of choice. Measuring the momentum like a cut of an axe against the wind. Along the grain, the poet measures with rhythm, a dancing lifeline.
Spacing out tasks that use a combination of time + energy akin to placing cookies on a baking sheet. How far will they spread under the heat?
When I portion out time in relation to night and day I begin to see it is not so equally partitioned in its splay. The more I break it down, the more it creates a feeling of anxiousness. At this portal of tension, I pause to see where I can enter into the same thing from a new angle.
In these darkest days of the year the quality of time shifts like sands on a misty cliff, blurring the edge. In order to find ease, I drop the clock and go for a walk. My feet find a pace that is natural and allows insight to come along.
Grandfather Time rocks in dynamics with Grandmother Moon’s cosmic walk, evening comes early to the party, I count sparkles in the particles of old mountains, a composition of position. Here the grid is shimmering in recognition.
At the rivers edge in the coastal mountains, as the temps ice the waters in place, pausing free flow, winter gives way to sandy beaches.
It is a strange and beautiful thing.
The sands of time are forever slowly/quickly shifting in the minds eye.
Everything is moving in mutable form.
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Time is a spinning hourglass.
Held suspended
floating
swimming
in infinity. As a woman of the earth, sky and sea sometimes it feels as if the seasons are following me….
It is as if I am ahead, or behind, and they are early.
Somehow I manage to be before. So I wait. Then I am late. Holding on.
Dropping the urge to catch anything, I drift in my cosmic chamber of body song.
Why does art need to make sense? I ponder. The dangling thoughts snag on the roaming tidal observations. I hear nothingness fall forward. Stillness lingers behind.
And then the moon nudges me to recall what poem presses on… feeding my hunger on that cold snowy night.
Recounting the words hanging like drying herbal codes of wonder. A pause in a busy kitchen.
This time of year it is the cool air that has me hugging the changing vibrations a bit tighter. A sound caressing the emanations offers an inside view.
Waiting for that clue to follow the crumbs to the bread stacked beside and baking in the hearth of the heart.
What lights the inner hallways of dreams to wake you from the waves slapping the cave of the sleeping breath?
Ah yes there it is - the one truth of breath.
Breathe and be with the embodiment of seasonal poetry exploring itself alive.
This is what the moment is asking.
The seasonal play a reminder time is a changing landscape. So is the mind.
When it feels like time is tracking me, or I am hot on the trails of time, I disrupt my mental obsession with a wander in the woods in order to see what I can see and hear the here of now.
Pressure creates diamonds… along with heat and time. Patience, passion, force.
I make diamonds, with photos, shapes and colour, words and walking, sound.
Listening to the water beneath the wind. I hear things moving in all directions.
I am making a stew with ingredients that are hard to find but also everywhere. The recipe is a blank page stained with the oil of devotion. Do you want a copy?
I’d say it’s delicious however it is different every time.
I’m sure you’ll be fine.
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The duality is strong in the winter. The warm-cold opposing each other constantly. Except on those soft days that punctuate as a subtle note of difference.
In the void of heat that exists on the northern lands this time of year the cozy is what calls to me, and I say yes please.
Adoring the mix of sensations available in the polar season. I tug my knits closer.
The seasons blend under my boot and above me the winds give a lecture on space.
Another poem marches to its own beat and enters my field.
Our frequencies connect and the muse meets the artist once more.
Inspired, I make diamonds with my time from the beautiful things I find.
Time is an open window
And a swinging door
Time plays in the shadows
And sneaks below the floor
Time is a feathered trickster
Time is a leaping frog
Time is a treasured turtle
Pushing the sands along
Time is a sleeping bear
Time is the cloth we wear
Time is an arcing rainbow
Expanding contained flow
Time where did you go
Time what do we know
Time stretching like rubber
transforming as a structure
Bound by time we are stretched
Time a spinning arrow
Pointing to and away
from the Center bending space
Time is a Spinning hourglass
Cycling through future and past
In the Present is the axis
Hugged by infinity & boundless
N<>N
When I stop to capture a found scene breaking the waking dream, the angle and moment documented creates a freshness, it is repetitious though not repeatable.
That exact ray of light casting that specific shadow is an anomaly. This is how I have learned to appreciate the subtle rhythms of existence.
If it were not for timelessness, time would not exist.
The deeper you go, the less definable you become.
~Stephen Levine.
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Ode to Winter Moon The snow lays like heaps of blankets at the bases of trees A cold white in view and feeling Snowflakes free fall in a gentle cascade disappearing into my layers moistening my skin I tilt my face upward to feel them against my bare lips letting my jaw slip down allowing a few to slide inside my mouth and I taste the nothingness quick before they melt into memory The Moon swallowed me whole last night while I dreamt an improbable dream It was then that I drank from the bottomless cup of internal desire Swinging thoughts gave way to marauding characters at play who turned to stare at me when I asked their names Motionless and speech lost on tongues tied while weaving forth a lesson that faces speak louder than words untrue The Moon nudged me again it’s glowing cold embers of hollow stone asking me to remember the question I really wanted to ask And so I spoke with sounds that spawned deep in my lungs forced by my belly to surface “why are we here and there and also nowhere?” Laughing, not at me, but, at the peculiar scene padding it’s way through space following time walking Carefully, the moon showed me its edges, turning where it spun Not round at all, I mused, and kind of lumpy with many dips and rolling places, even gritty strangely shaping itself from roaming shadow I stepped back to see the lunar emanation squaring facing me why ask if your ears are closed the query waving puffs of light in my face Breathing in I gestured to my heart and awoke to the morning light. N<>N
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As the cold full moonlight illuminates the snow fallen fields in the valley beneath the ancestors, one thing is crisp and clear. I will make art with my lifetime here.
With Love as Creative Life Force,
Nichola Anne Napora
N<>N @ The Embodied Explorer
This newsletter is art activism issued in devotion to a creative revolution.
Please share the love and send to a friend, or two, or 16 as I’d love to reach 100 subscribers this year!~
May the widsom of nature whisper its sweetness upon the open ears of time.
Artwork and All Writing Created / Copyright Nichola Napora / Mystic Peaks Studio
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Some Things About Nichola, The Artist:
Nichola’s art and writing is both an embodiment of exploration and a living prayer. The intention behind her work and play is an expression of Love and a call to Self Liberation through awareness and recognition. Always exploring what is means to live in a sustainable evolving world, inclusive of culture. She recognizes one can find freedom within and then must begin the sacred work of unwinding the rules that bind from the outside. A Steward and Guardian of the Wild, the Imagination and Creative Expression, and a Keeper of the Keys, Sacred Stories, Watersheds / Streams, Dreams, and the Elements. You can learn more and get in touch with her here: mysticpeaks.com
If not in her studio, you can find her in the forest, with the waters, by the fire, tracking beauty and awe, or tracing the light of stars.
Stay Cozy, Wild and Creative xx
I enjoyed that Nici - good stuff!
Keep in mind though that time only exists as a human perception -
The idea that time may not exist is a controversial topic in physics and philosophy:
Einstein's theory of relativity
Suggests that the universe is a static, four-dimensional block, and that time doesn't flow from past to future.
Quantum mechanics
Assumes time as background, and not an observable.
Loop quantum gravity
Proposes that space and time are made of a network of extremely small chunks, or “loops”, which appears to eliminate time entirely.
Carlo Rovelli
A quantum gravitational researcher who argues that time is merely a function of human perception.