Jean Bolen writes about kronos and kairos
in the Tao of Psychology. “Kairos is an
ancient Greek word meaning the right or opportune moment (the supreme moment).
The ancient Greeks had two words for time, chronos and kairos. The former
refers to chronological or sequential time, the latter signifies a time in
between, a moment of indeterminate time in which something special happens.
While chronos is quantitative, kairos has a qualitative nature.” We live in both kinds of times.
Missing her mother. Is that time called
kairos? Kairos, the time that is really a river through our days, connects us
to those primary relationships. Mrs. Scattergood was sitting on the beach and
felt her mother’s presence. Was it the
thought about asking her for a nickel to buy a fudgesicle that connected her to
mother? Or in doing what she loves? And
loving what she is doing? Cooking, making soup. In stirring the soup, she
brings the smells to circulate throughout the house, creating a connective
tissue that involves every aspect of your being. Her mother brought her to cooking. The Friday
night ritual poured over its banks like the Nile and seeped into other days of
the week. Soup is always good. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you soup is for
winter. Soup is always good, every time of year, nearly every day.
~
Her mother brought her into the streams of
time. They can always find each other in kairos time. If you are in this stream
you may feel a total, complete, satisfying immersion into beauty, into love,
into the visual and physical weaving and changing, shifting and fractaling of
everything that is memory.
~
Kairos time is not confined to the
photographer’s magic hours of early morning and evening. It is a way to be in
the world where you may be able to reach your mother; where you can come into
contact with others no longer able to be in kronos time. Barry, your sister, your brother, his
partner, too soon from your daily life, from your kronos times which aren’t in
the world you must return to. But for now you walk in beauty, as the Navaho
say, and move in this stream of time where all primary relationships are part
of the stream; a part of the cornucopia, where an abundance of love flows;
where an abundance of contact and holding, of hearing the voices you’ve missed
caressing your ears, of being touched by their warm hands, of gliding over the
shallow inlet waters through the sedge islands made of grasses and pickleweed,
where salt hay carpet the wooden base of the osprey towers which frame your
view of the sky; the stillness of the waters dipped and stirred by your
paddles.
~
“One must summer and winter with the land
and wait its occasions. Pine woods that
take two and three seasons to the ripening of cones, roots that lie by in the
sand seven years awaiting a growing rain, firs that grow fifty years before
flowering-these do not scrape acquaintance.” Mary Austin, The Land of Little
Rain. You cannot wish for kairos time.
It will be there. But you may have to
wait its occasions.
~
‘I wish to tell you that it was something
that looked ancient and as though a sacred object. But it was her face and
demeanor, though she was young and sweetly beautiful, that looked and felt
sacred and old in a way of a loved tradition, but held in her body. Her sister came to us with knowledge that the
link to us was recognized, honored and strong.
It is this which I hold. This is what I hold if you want a name like I
do, I would call it love. It is the placenta from which our sacred lives are
connected to this beauty that is the creative spirit. We pass this between us because we carry it
with sacred intention and love this with a sense of solemnity sometimes and
other times with the same sense of joy and satisfaction we have had from
learning to tie our shoes. This is a joy that ties us together.’ Baubo
~
Baubo told Mrs. Scattergood to remember
the three weavers. “You are one of them. The other two are your sisters.’
~
Barry told her, “I’ll keep you cool.”
~
When she felt she was in kairos time, she
felt connected to a part of an intricate network of living beings. This connection is woven through multiple kinds
of time, through generations of evolving relationships. We are not alone, we
are loved, we are in the stream of life and the worlds we inhabit and energize
with our blood and gifts hold us in an embrace of currents and the rivers
within the ocean. Rachel Carson wrote,
“The first thing that impresses us about our currents is their permanence.”
Time is a weaver and we are a part of the weave. Even our awareness of this is
one of the 10,000 things.
raga or the 10,000 things (6), kronos and kairos, by freda karpf
