The Time famine was my whole personality

I want to talk to you about time. As with everything I write here, my wish is always that it might be useful to you in some way simply to read this. And today it’s also another way into talking about my new in-person offering in San Francisco, with the working title: Remembering Retreats. So, here we go. Here we are.

I’ve written about time a lot over the years, I’m forever fascinated with how fake and also real it is. I’m obsessed with noticing and transforming the skipping ahead the mind does. As Eckhart Tolle describes really well, most of us spend most of the time vaguely waiting. For the weekend. For the end of the day. For a meal. For the time our kids go back to school. For the time our kids are off from school. For the time we get well. For the time when the astrological transit is over. For the time when the vacation begins. For the time when a political nightmare is over. For the time once my kid has finished their melt down. But, and this is really incomprehensible to the everyday mind: these times we wait for do not exist.

I’m not even being spiritual here. It’s just literally—it doesn’t exist. That could probably be the end of this writing, of any writing I do. It’s the ultimate mic drop when you really take it in.

I would like to remind you about the thing that does, however, exist (maybe?): Right Now.

Time works more like the breath, I think. The moment you bring your attention to your breath, it changes. Even if you try not to change it! The attention itself changes it!

When I’m in despairing mind, it tells me that the distance (in time) between my current self and my “embodied” self, or my “calm” self, or my “awakened” self, or my whatever-desired self, is mountains of psychological and spiritual “work.” It tells me I have so much to do, and it’s going to be such a slog, and even then, no matter how much I’ve done, I’m still going to have to do more, and I’m never going to have enough time to do it.

In case this is how it appears to you too I am here to audaciously proclaim IT’S NOT TRUE! Not in my experience. The work between us and joy is a figment of imagination of the egoic mind. It’s all tied in with this cultural delusion called meritocracy. BTW, I’m not trying to take anyone’s psychological or spiritual work away! I love me some work! I’m just saying the work is not in between us and the joy. Rupert Spira says this best when he describes our shared being / joy as the blue sky. And any feelings that make it appear that we are not always that joy are the clouds in front of the blue sky. Also not unreal, clouds are significant! Clouds are AMAZING. But they don’t change the blueness of the sky behind them.

Joy cannot exist in the future because the future does not exist.

So we don’t have to wait, because we CANNOT wait. It’s not possible. We don’t need more time to get there to the joy, because the joy is not conditional to a particular time and or space.

And! Not believing so hard in the appearance of the linearity of time is a way to become available to the abiding, conditions-free kind of joy.

I have two points here: one is, let’s practice that remembering the rest of our lives and see what happens. Let’s do it together?! Right now?!

Two is, I’m tending a hearth in my actual home where I remember this and I want you to come remember with me. I’ve been doing these Remembering Retreats with people this fall and I’m realizing that what is happening is when I tend this hearth, as in, I cultivate this literal physical space in my literal physical home for this kind of remembering, the space accrues a feeling of the blue sky mind. How time is experienced is so malleable—what good news!

If we don’t have more time, we don’t need it. By that I mean, the thought “I need more time,” when I don’t have it, causes suffering. If we don’t have more time, we don’t need it. This is my motto with raising two children right now. If I can’t go on a week-long retreat, it’s because Life is asking me to find this remembering place right where I am! I have been gifted this incredible task—by my own longing—to contact the sacred every single day of my life in 2026 living in a single-family home in Bay Area Arbitrary Intelligence* Gold Rush zone as a middle-aged white woman. Let’s Fucking Go! Hahahahaha. It sounds so funny to me and it’s also dead serious.

Anyway. I have two more of these Remembering Retreats available for Bay Area people in November. If you feel this longing too, I hope you’ll come remember that in two hours, we can intimately feel our participation in the most vital—and only—thing we’ve got: Right Now.

The paradox is, the more we wholeheartedly dive into Right Now, the more time abundance we feel.

You can book a Remembering Retreat for November on my scheduling page here.

*I got this perfect name for AI from Stephen Jenkinson.