The Circle of Time

I might never be able slow down time enough to capture the moment that change happens. Still, this moment feels like a doorway to a different world.

   
I was always waiting for the world to change me into someone else. As a child, I read enough storybooks to wish for change to happen. The wave of a wand, a sip of a bubbling potion, a step through an unusual doorway—and there I would be, braver, stronger. Able to see into the future. Able to fly.

Mostly, though, I couldn’t feel change happening in myself. I could only see it in the world around me—and then, only in stages. The seeds we planted in see-through jars in elementary school looked the same, morning after morning, and then one day the first tiny root appeared as if by magic. We carefully drew the phases of a monarch, with eggs giving way to caterpillars, then the chrysalis bursting open to reveal a butterfly. I remember using a marker to color in the orange sections on a piece of translucent paper and holding it against the window so that the sun shone through, turning the butterfly’s wings into stained glass. I watched everything so intently, maybe in part because each known, repeated pattern might give me a chance to catch transformation in the instant that it happened. That way, I’d know how to do it when it was my turn.

Even though I thought I was paying attention, there were so many cycles in the world around me that I took for granted. It wasn’t until college that I noticed the way the sun shifted slightly along its path through the year. Most days, I watched the sun set over the western edge of the San Francisco Bay and tracked its movements through the passing months. As fall moved into winter, the sunsets moved southward. Over the weeks and months, the sun dropped behind the Marin Headlands, then sunk between the two orange towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. Observing the cycle felt like a first awareness of my real place on the earth, a resident on a tilted planet. 

Where I live now, I watch the moon make a similar journey. In summer it rises in swollen gold over the water. In winter, the moon takes longer to appear—now a clear, cold white—from behind the Santa Ynez Mountains.

Last summer, I saw an exhibit by landscape painter Jorge Obregón that traced these same seasonal movements from the vantage point of the volcanoes that surround Mexico City. In Obregón’s paintings, the light of the sun and moon as they rose from behind Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl and dropped beneath the peaks of Nevado de Toluca felt otherworldly, surreal even—but the feeling of the paintings together, day by day, season by season, was grounding, a tether to the land and to time.

The exhibit, called A Portrait of Time, linked Obregón’s work to the agricultural calendar, and to the changing climate that is affecting the places he paints: these 17,000-foot peaks with glaciers and pine trees that exist in tropical latitudes. When I left the exhibit and returned to the streets—the surrounding volcanoes invisible behind the cityscape—I felt as if I’d joined the ongoing cycle of this place, part of what came before and what will come after.

I had this same sense of dropping deeper into a cycle when visiting multimedia artist Ethan Turpin at his studio in Santa Barbara, a place he calls one of the most flammable on earth. His father was a county firefighter, and Turpin now films wildland fires, both from the fire-line with fireproof camera housings and with remote cameras. He then uses the footage—from the earliest flames to the slow recovery of the post-fire landscape—to design and install immersive film projections that take viewers through the entire “burn cycle” of a wildfire.

Entering one of his Burn Cycle Project exhibits, Walk Into Wildfire, you’re first surrounded by flames. Then a time-lapse sequence that takes you from blackened burn scar to the emergence of new, green growth.  “There is rapid change that happens with wildfire, and then gradual change that comes with regrowth,” Turpin says. Seeing the entire cycle, he says, “helps us to not feel just the destructive side of fire. You get a real rounding of the sense of time.”

My own wonder at nature’s cycles—and my fear of their disruption in the face of climate change—became something I needed to explore, too, so that I could feel that same grounded confidence in time. These past few years I’ve been writing a short story collection called How to Capture Carbon. Many of the stories in my new collection look at magical transformations as a way of exploring how these changes affect our inner landscape. In “Star, Fish,” a story that first appeared here at Terrain.org, a mother watches her children slowly transform into sea creatures and determines that the only way to stem this tide of loss is by losing a part of her own body. Writing stories lets me explore what happens as things change (I was as surprised by what this character did as I was writing as anyone!), lets me feel this arc of transformation as if it were happening to me.

It feels embarrassing to say this, but once I was an adult, part of the reason I wanted to have children is that I thought that this would change me. That I might not grow wings, but there would be some other fundamental reshaping. I confessed this to a visiting friend when she asked what it was like to be a mother. We were walking along the beach, and I had my third baby wrapped against my chest. I could have said something about not sleeping, or diapers, or how I now understood people whose lives revolved around nap times. But instead I told her I wished I had become someone different. “I’m still the same me, more or less,” I told her.

“Who exactly was it that you were hoping to be?”

I didn’t have an answer.

Now, each spring, my youngest son and I look for the monarch chrysalises that appear on the wooden fence that runs along the entrance to his elementary school. Each day, we study their progress, look for them to turn transparent enough to see the orange and black wings inside.

The transformation inside is cell-altering— a caterpillar first slips its own skin to form a chrysalis, then dissolves most of its body, leaving behind the cells it needs to breathe and cells that contain the instructions for its new, winged form. We watch: waiting, wondering. But to the caterpillar, and the butterfly, how different does it feel? Does the butterfly realize that it has wings, or only that the world somehow seems different to move through, that what were once great distances now seem easier to cross?

In April, we start talking about the monarchs as we walk to school. How many will there be? How soon will they arrive? Will our beloved crossing guard make signs again that point out each chrysalis, then document the day that it opened? It’s been a long school year—there were times when we walked this same route anxious, teary, remembering again and again to breathe. The monarchs and the bright flame seem to light the way toward the end of the year, a graceful flight after months of struggle.

But they don’t come. We see them flitting over the neighborhood, but no chrysalis hangs its tender green along the fence. The last day of school and the fence is still empty. A few times this summer, I stop by to look and see nothing.

Then in late August, we are crossing the street on one of the first days of school when the crossing guard points to the entrance. “Take a look right before you go in. There’s something there to welcome you.” We pass by an enormous sign taped to the fence, celebrating the new school year.

It takes a few days after the sign comes down for me to see it: the first chrysalis, tucked beneath the fence rail.

I stand there with without wings of my own, but with my son’s hand in mine. I might never be able slow down time enough to capture the moment that change happens, either in the world around me or the one within. Still, this moment—and every moment when I stop to truly pay attention—feels like a doorway to a different world, one which glitters with the promise that all is held in the circle of time.

Cameron Walker is a writer based in California. Her journalism, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications including The New York Times, bioGraphic, Orion, and The Last Word on Nothing. She is the author of three books, including a new short story collection, How to Capture Carbon, and the essay collection Points of Light: Curious Essays on Science, Nature, and Other Wonders Along the Pacific Coast.

Read Cameron Walker’s story “Star, Fish,” winner of the Terrain.org 11th Annual Contest in Fiction.

Header photo by Cooky07, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Cameron Walker by Sara Prince.