I woke up in the early morning in the canyon where I live, well before the earth stirred with the buzz of sun, with the distinct thought of time. Time like a thread brought with me from the dreamtime. The sky was black with the new moon, the atmosphere profoundly still in the silence of the hour. A dense tree outside my bedroom window—an unfamiliar shape with the distance of the past month—appeared to me as a great black widow, its web made of branches from surrounding trees extended as far as my perspective could venture.
Chronos, the weaving thread whispered in the black night. The web of trees with its illusory spider hovering outside brought the kind of illuminating chill to my spine that tells me to listen, to pay attention.
When an image from the external world converges with a thought, feeling, or image from the internal world, we call this synchronicity. True, this external image was imagined, courtesy of my tired vision and emergence from the dream state. But, I had never seen the trees like this before. I had never woke in this dark hour, on the new moon, to see an immense black widow at the center of a web. And all the while, this voice, resounding from my slumber, softly repeating the Greek word for time.
It is practical that time, as both sense and concept, hangs within my periphery. Two days ago I celebrated my 38th birthday in Paris. Surrounded by a handful of dear friends, old and new, young and aging, in a place where I marked previous birthdays, I marveled at the beauty and power of a solar return. Cancer season always feels remarkably alive for me. That is to say this time of year, in particular, invokes in me a sort of rekindling. We hear the term solar return and understand that it means birthday, but do we fully grasp the magic of this reality? It is the moment when the sun arrives again to the very same place in its relation to the earth as the day we were born. To see this archetypally is to recognize the pattern that was cast in that first breath of air we took into our lungs, that first gasp of life we took as individual beings.
An astrological season is a time when the sun dwells within a domain of the sky’s sphere named for its constellating pattern. An archetypal view of the cosmos honors that the patterns that exist externally, in our outer world, reflect and correspond to patterns that make up our internal being: As above, so below; As within, so without. There is an inherent relationship between macrocosm and microcosm, between physical reality and psychic reality.
Cancer season begins with the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, when the earth hangs most near to its star, on the longest day of the year (according to the Western zodiac, which differs from the Vedic). Archetypally, Cancer is related to the element of water and is ruled by the moon. The moon, we know, pulls on the earth’s tides with its gravitational weight. In the same way, the moon symbolically relates to the unconscious and our emotional world; it is that gravitational force that influences our internal waters. Cancer is the archetypal pattern of sensitivity to these waters. It is aware of the power of tide and groundwater for fertility and planting. It is creative, nostalgic, and interested in cultivating depth and connection within the self and its wider intimate bodies, within home and family.
I was born under a Cancer sun and Cancer moon, meaning both of these cosmic bodies were in the domain of the sky where the constellation we call Cancer resides. The sun and moon are our most significant planetary bodies, supporting life on this planet. In alchemy, the sun and moon, sol and luna, relate to the conscious and unconscious aspects of the psyche. This morning, waking in the dark of night, the sun and moon are both in Cancer, where they were when I took my first breath. And so, the feeling of deep return. It is something cavernous within my bones and blood that contain memory beyond my individual lifetime. It feels immense and overwhelmingly humbling. It is something of a rebirth.
The cyclic nature of time is deeply feminine. The moon reminds us of this circular pattern most visibly, as it hangs in the sphere of sky, illuminated by the light of the sun. Except for the time we call the new moon, when the earth casts its shadow upon its body, the moon is shaped by sunlight. Not only does its form shift by this illusion by the light, but the moon also reflects internal phases—both biological and psychic. There are phases of fullness, illumination, and clarity; of fertility and waxing; of waning and shadow. This creative repetition and return, of emergence to fullness and falling back into darkness is a remembrance of our own creative nature, as mirrored within body and mind.
This whisper that resounded for me in the dark night focused on another complex aspect of time: that of the masculine Chronos. The particularity of this term was what grabbed hold of me, urging creative inquiry. What does Chronos want of me? Knowing something of his mythology, but not having a distinct or present connection to the idea, I grasped that a theme was emerging from the unconscious.
For the ancient Grecian, time was a god, as were all forces of nature. Cronus was the name they offered, and they imagined him as the primordial son of Earth and Sky, parents who birthed a generation of Titan deities, who reigned the elemental powers. The Titans were fierce, indestructible forces, and Cronus, although the youngest of his siblings, ruled among them. He overthrew his father, Ouronus (who the Romans revisioned as Saturn), as he lay with his wife, castrating him with a scythe made of stone. (We might think of the way we experience time as something omnipresent and thus severed, or separate, from space, recalling Ouranus symbolizes sky; Time demands we bow to it). Time itself does not age, and in the Orphic theogonies, the god emerged from earth and water and gave birth to aether, chaos and an egg. Cronus turns the zodiac wheel but stands apart from its matter.
Cronus fears losing his power to his offspring, just as his father lost his. And so he begins a practice of devouring his children, swallowing them whole. In the mythological mind, eventually Cronus is overthrown, too. He falls by the hand of his son Zeus, who becomes the great ruler of Mount Olympus, standing atop the Greek pantheon. Time becomes less prescient than the archetypal forces of nature and the human psyche which manifest in constant interplay.
There are two aspects of this mythology that stand out to me now. First, this aspect of Cronus which is fierce but also fearful. The nature of time to spin its wheel in endless unfolding is often depicted by the mythological symbol of the uroboros, an image of the serpent eating its tail. Time fears not its own finitude, but its eternity. Time falls into the background when a wider perspective of its unfolding reveals something of the timeless.
The all-seeing dragon is a symbol of time, related to Chronos. The Uroboros has the meaning of eternity (αίων) ... The identification of the All-Seeing with Time probably explains the eyes on the wheels in Ezekiel’s vision ... We mention this identification because of its special importance: it indicates the relation between the mundus archetypus of the unconscious and the ‘phenomenon’ of Time – in other words, it points to the synchronicity of archetypal events.
—Jung, Collected Works Vol. 8, On the Nature of the Psyche , 1947/1954: para 394
Time’s fear is its becoming insignificant, falling to the wayside by way of its archetypal manifestations which take center stage in endless repetition and expression. The archetypal forces take part in creating a masquerade which mask the uroboros, or the eternal.
It is this fear which drives Time to swallow his offspring (we see the birthing of archetypal personifications come into being as particular images, only to be swept up again in generational and era shift). Reframing fear as a psychic boundary or structure that contains in a useful way is interesting here. The Roman personification of Cronus as Saturn is helpful in this regard, as is an astrological viewpoint, the second aspect that feels relative to me now.
Saturn is the great disciplinarian, the ruler of karma. Saturn is the god of cause and effect, of sequence and consequence. Saturn reminds us of our limitations while also challenging us to withstand their pressure to transform and expand them. Saturn transits are often feared for they can feel like constrictions or punishments. Saturn is the fierce teacher, bound to tradition and custom (and long-standing beliefs). It is the aspect of being that demands boundaries and strong containers. While transformation requires that we challenge our edges, the necessity for containment and discipline can be useful in practice and being (we’ll get to some creative applications that arise here—the alchemical temenos, or container for transmutation comes to mind). It can also be practical to work within and utilize historical realities and time-tested methods. Time demands we honor its structure.
This particular aspect of chronos—its fear of becoming insignificant and its harsh demands of structure—feel related to this distinct personal phase in my life, as I celebrate a momentous return of sun and moon. I didn’t awaken with fear, but I did hear chronos as a humming repetition, asking me to tend to it, and through that tending, to open to its guidance and offering.
What parts of my life are asking for discipline and structure in order to honor the limitations of my lifetime? How might containers for my creativity, my thinking and being, serve not only my sense of purpose and fulfillment but offer value to the collective and its unfolding? What might these containers be?
When I consider these questions, the immediate impulse is to create a space for creative inquiry, specifically with language. While I have published a small handful of pieces over the last few years, I have much to say and explore. The creative spirit is generous, and I often have more ideas than (imagined) time and space to explore them. (As of this writing, I have a list of nearly a hundred titles and themes for pieces and projects I’d like to expand on, a list that only continues to grow). How might I better utilize my time (even, to play with and expand time), to serve this creative impulse? What might support me in this effort?
The resounding response that arises is a container dedicated to my primary medium (a form of temenos). A digital space that can serve as my studio, a place to experiment in weaving together the breadth of my interests to create a singular, evolving tapestry, where I might spin a web with mythical, imaginal, poetic, ecological, literary, philosophical, and theoretical threads, together in interplay. Where the personal and objective come together to bring about the Hidden Third, some emergent new knowing.
A third aspect of time has been here all along, implicit in that initial humming from dream space. As the sun began to rise and I lay mentally repeating chronos, I began to link it with what is often seen as its counterpart: kairos time.
Kairos is an idea that expands time into something more malleable than its typical linearity. While chronos time is measurable, quantitative and sequential, imagined as the Titan swallowing both the past and future, kairos can be imagined as qualitative, as time outside of time. In today’s lexicon, we understand kairos to mean the opportune time; I like to think of kairos as the stream where events fall together in time, making possible the experience of synchronicity. Creative practitioners call this the flow state.
Improvisation is the method by which kairos thrives.
It is that mode which is deeply Hermetic, that is, it moves between boundaries, realms, and worlds and brings messages from the other side. As an act of true creative discovery, it releases any illusion to outcome and surrenders itself to the experience and delight of play. It is that release of grasping a moment, and thus, transports to the realm of the timeless and eternal. In this movement, we can bring something of that world back with us.
As strange as it may seem, the synchronistic vision of the black widow, illusory in the black moonless night, invoked this sense of kairos time and play. Seen as devouring lover and mother (much like the offspring-swallowing Cronus), the black widow is one of the most feared of crawling creatures. She is a symbol of darkness, a kind of underworld goddess. She represents mystery, the unconscious, and generative creativity that requires compost, humus worked over in the undergrowth, beyond the realms of the living and the known. What my dreamy eyes saw out the window was not just the immensity of this dark creature, but the engaged activity, immersed in the creative act of weaving of her web, and finding herself in its center.