On Timeless Time, Abraham & Isaac, and Internal Family Systems

(Also please answer the reader poll below!)

With Tarana Deepjyoti at Shitla Devi temple in the Himalayas—a place of timeless time

I will turn 68 in a few days (on Halloween, natch!), and I must say it just keeps getting better and better. One reason it gets better is surely the phenomenally powerful healing work I’ve been doing with my IFS (internal family systems) therapist for several years now. After five decades of on-and-off therapy in dozens different modalities, IFS is the greatest I’ve found. It’s a brilliantly effective healing system (thanks to the effectiveness of the system of meters, I know how to recognize an effective system when I meet one!). Lately I’ve been seeing a hypnotherapist who combines IFS’s flexible, spiritual, poetic techniques with reiki and bodywork which is, if such a thing were possible, an even more unbelievable combination. So I have been shedding baggage at a great rate!

One of the unexpected pieces I’ve been shedding is time-guilt. I generally make every effort to be punctual and professional, because that generally makes life easier, and it is generally kinder to others. But, it must be said, not always. Haven’t we all had moments when we are SO grateful to someone else for being late or for flaking out on an appointment at the exact right moment? I have come to trust and love those who allow some well-timed “mistakes” just as much as those who invariably show up at the planned minute). This time I am the one who has messed up, on a class I was scheduled to offer in Meter Magic Spiral, and as I am rescheduling this event I find myself guilt-free. It’s remarkable—a palpable change from how I would have felt even a few weeks ago.

Awareness of the change puts me in mind of one of my favorite books in the world, The Untouched Key by Alice Miller, the great thinker and healer. I recommend it passionately. This book centers on the founding story of modern patriarchy, the story of Abraham and Isaac. Miller focuses on the fact that Abraham, about to kill his son, is looking not down into his child’s suffering face, but up into the face of the God he wants to please. This is the cause of his cruelty (and who ever talks about the trauma to Isaac of this near-murder experience????). Miller compares this cruelty to our own cruelty to our children, caused by looking into the remembered, internalized faces of our own parents instead of into the eyes of our children. (I learned recently to my shock that pilgrims to Mecca are in fact reenacting Abraham’s obedience to God and are required to throw stones at “demons” who are trying to dissuade them from killing their own metaphorical sons!! I imagine these demons to have been, originally, women’s hearts).

(here I am interrupted by a phone call that I answer only out of a related kind of patriarchal guilt—followed by a self-healing session to process that guilt and move beyond it. I recorded it all and may post it here someday (see p.s. below).

My sense of patriarchal time is akin to my sense of the internalized cruel parents. How often have I worried about punctuality, made my top priority to be “on time,” out of loyalty to a standard of timeliness that nobody I was with there and then actually needed at all? How often, instead of actually looking into the faces of the women I am with and giving my attention to their needs, have l looked up at the face of a clock as Abraham looked the face of God? How often has the “face” of that clock prevented me from facing the people I’m with? During my early journey in Africa, in the Sudan, the biggest shock was to be among people who treated time exactly the way I do. I had had a lot of experience, in a remote cabin, with what I thought of as “timeless time” but I had not known that entire societies can be built on African time a.k.a. Indigenous time, Indian time, or Pagan time as the witches say. Now I know better!

OK, here is a survey— a poll.

Lately I have been running a little patreon about all my witchy and feminist ideas such as this post, and keeping this substack focused mostly on poetry and meter. But it’s too much to manage them separately. I am thinking of combining them and just posting everything here. What do y’all think?