My music is playing in the next room. Lost. Where am I? Time. How the hell do I end up writing a substack before working on my novel? Perhaps it is because I write my substack that I can work on my novel. I give to you and then to myself.
I wanted to talk about Chronos vs Kairos and how I have been rattling against the very cages of time itself. I have so much time. I have so little time. Death has always given my life meaning. The fact I will one day die emboldens me to life so vibrantly. I am the rose who has to bloom fully before it perishes. I refute any other way because I know it to be the only way.
But time, how to speak about time?
I shall began with a story. I have lived a rather lonely existence. I went places often by myself. Yes, take myself dancing to a club playing french pop music. Yes, go the Hollywood Cemetery for a screening of a movie that I love. Yes, go the beach alone, write, read, enjoy the waves. Yes, listen to the music of sad indie girls. Yes, enjoy hyperfixiations and books and pull tarot cards. Yes, yes, yes. I did this all by myself. It is not inherently unique, but it wasn’t less lonely. All too often I wish I would meet somebody there. At the Hollywood Cemetery, at the club, at the concert, at the beach, but I never did. I was in my twenties doing all these things alone in LA.
I meet my friends at the end of my 20s. We do exactly all these things and more. All too often I exclaim, “Oh, I’ve been here before!” “I know this place!” “I love going here!” I am thirty years old when I meet them, why?
Why not there when I needed a friend, when I wanted a companion? Back in time, all those years ago, why didn’t this happen so? Why so late? Why at the very tail end of one of the most formative ages? I don’t know, ask Kairos.
Kairos is time, but not the time we understand. Chronos we know. Our everyday time. Clock in at 7. Leave work at 8. Grab drinks at 9. I’m 15 minutes late. My flight arrives in a hour. Time. Time. Time. Chronos. But Kairos is not any of these things, it is divine timing.
Oh, the reviled divine timing! You’ll meet your soulmate in divine timing. You'll find your calling in divine timing. It’s all in divine timing. Trust the process, the universe, god, etc. It is time we cannot measure and therefore cannot understand. We hate it. Even, I, get restless with its imaginary mechanisms. Why? Why did I meet these special friendships at such an age, particularly an age where I feel called to travel, to move, to leave? Why did I meet friends, friends I ached for in the entirety of my 20s, to only abandon them? Well, the answer is simple, I no longer ached for them.
You heard it in every spiritual teaching and teacher, every law of attraction and manifestation, “only when you no longer desire the object, will it arrive.” It’s not that I don’t want friends, quite the opposite, the friendships have empowered me (I want more friends), it’s rather that, now, I trust in my ability to acquire them. It’s not ironic that my top spotify song in my year of great friendship was “You’re on Your Own Kid” by Taylor Swift, a song about believing in yourself implicitly before all others. Self-trust, self-belief, self-knowledge.
This method of letting go, however, is not necessarily a remedy to Kairos, nor do I believe we can create formula to bypass the cosmic law of divine timing. There are things we simply cannot explain, and time is one of them. The mystery of time; no there is no set schedule for that. No arrival and departures boards. No ETA at all. And this understanding does not make me a super enlightened being either. I still bemoan the fact I don’t have a loving boyfriend, that I don’t have my dream job, or that I haven’t written my novel, that my body isn’t where I want it to be, blah blah.
It’s strange to think that only when I don’t desire these things that they will appear, the true nature of Kairos. And yet desire is a tricky mistress, desire grabs us by its throat. The eternal mirror, “you want that”, “oh, yes you really want this thing”, “when I get this, I will be xyz”. I can’t teach you how to not desire. That’s not my speciality, I want everything, I want nothing. I have no fixed desire, as I’ve said in my previous substack. But boy, do I have a lot of rotating desires.
So, as I write this on the Chinese Lunar Year (go dragon), I am in the crossroads of desires and kairos. Where to go? I have pulled two moon cards from two different decks. They say wait, they say “girl, I don’t fucking know”. I don’t know either, liminal time is such a time. But instinct, instinct will save us. Intuition will guide us. I have Anais Nin as my leader and the moon as my compass. Somehow I’ll get there in divine timing, somehow I’ll get on that plane, somehow I’ll publish that novel. There is a set time in chronological time that I’ll achieve those things, yes, but Kairos is king. Only in sacred, divine timing will the clock strike and the spell will be broken and the gates of all the things we ever dreamed of will come rushing in.
Til then, take your time.
“The Cat Speaks”
I saw a tortoise-shell cat behind the gates Who stared at me like he had a lot to say “What are you doing behind bars?” He says “Don’t you know you’re supposed to be on the other side with the blue sky, where the evergreen grows and the sun, well, the sun never shows?” Gigantic white clouds over head and the promise of rain to temper the foliage already simmering with dew A cold wind comes from the east and you begin to wonder all sorts of things But I did it for me and I cannot stop for peace, not until death tells me other things
MUSING:
PERHAPS WE CAN ONLY LIVE SOMETHING MEANT FOR US WHEN WE STOP WANTING IT.
WHEN WE LET THE IRON GRIP GO, THAT IS WHEN ALL THE REST CAN FLOW.
“A Cup of Stars”
I wonder if I’m Eleanor Vance, shy of 32, walking up a hill with a victorian manor looming in the foreground. Drinking coffee from a cup of stars and wondering why I chose to mythologize everything I endure. It all must have a sense of story, a clue. I must go to a castle, where it’s haunted and magical. Where I fall apart on my opening jump, where I tumble down the stairs, down the rabbit hole of old. Where no one ever manages to see me fall. Caramel cookie, cerulean ceilings, and painted glass. An owl hoots below. Everything opens at the magic touch, everything I see behind daisy-colored eyes. What was invisible to the naked eye; I couldn’t look at you through the crowd. Yet I saw you there in the background, but not from the stage where the light burns too bright. It’s such a gaudy place, and I love it for it. I love things for their faults and never for their glittering bows put on the display to give a good show. No, I love the things in the vault, The medieval, the ugly, the magnetic. I believe in magic, pure and simple. I walked up the hill and down to a broken car that still runs. Yes, I took my cup of stars.
“Why I Write”
The words need to be said are at the tip of my tongue escaping declaration with each scattered thought lost in a web of subconscious threads and dreams pulling each string to return the ever conscious stream of meditations or at worst; a well-known revelation each truth evades me each word lingers in the ether each chain of knowing broken by the need to jump in and out of the universal timeline a paradox forms in my throat and the world reveals itself to be nothing more than a carefully curated succession of hopes.
absolutely loved this one 🌹