TRANSCRIPT: Notes From Dunfanaghy 20 – Deep Time
Hi, it’s Megan. This is today’s Notes from Dunfanaghy. This one comes to you from Dunfanaghy still, and I’m not even sure how late this is — a week late? Maybe not quite as much as that.
I want to talk about time today, and the fact that this is a week late plays into all of this. The reason this is a week late is because I didn’t feel like doing it — not that I didn’t feel like doing it, but, as I said in an earlier note, I’ve been in Dunfanaghy working and writing, and I decided to prioritize other things towards the end of last week, because I felt like what I was supposed to be doing was being in the landscape.
I think maybe the last voice note that I recorded, I talked about having a resistance to photographing certain parts of the landscape, or sharing images of certain parts of the landscape, and thinking about, like, what does the landscape want, what does the land want. And I think, kind of following on from there, I just followed my instinct to be where I was.
Like, the time that I have in Dunfanaghy and in Donegal is very limited. I live in London, I have small children who go to school, there’s a whole schedule, it’s difficult to get time here. So the time that I have here is very limited and precious, and I just had a really strong instinct to just be here. And I felt kind of called to different parts of the landscape, and I went to those places, fit it in as much as I could.
And so there’s something about time in this place that works differently for me, and it makes me think about time when we’re doing our real work. And this maybe ties back to some of the stuff that I talked about in the first few voice notes, where I talked about time in the black hole perspective. So let me see if I can tie those thoughts together.
So one of the things that I love about coming to Dunfanaghy, one of the things that I love about the Dunfanaghy retreat, one of the things that I love about any kind of retreat or workshop, whether it’s here or somewhere else, whether I’m running it or I’m attending it, is time works differently. Whenever you decide to take time out of your life and go somewhere with a very specific purpose, and there is a container being held for you, time immediately starts to work differently.
Like, I have — it’s been a week, I think, since I sent the last voice note, and in a way it feels like I have been here for two days, and in another way it feels like I’ve been here for months. Like, there is a deep time that we get access to whenever we just allow ourselves to be somewhere and to be in process.
And so that’s one of my favourite things about coming here. And it’s one of my favourite things about the Dunfanaghy retreat — we have four days together, but it can feel like a very long time, because we are going deep and wide for those four days, and so we can cover a lot of ground physically, but also intellectually, psychically, all of those things.
And so I think that happens when we go on retreat somewhere, when we enter a container like that. I also think it happens within our work, when we are doing our real work. Like, sometimes my life can feel very bitty, my work can feel very bitty, especially when it is, you know, in the midst of childcare issues, and children being sick, and schedules being disrupted, and all of those things. And there are times when it can feel like, am I ever going to get anywhere with this stuff that I’m trying to work on. Like, I can have the sense of there is this whole body of work that I’ve only just begun to discover, like, it’s just the tip of the iceberg what I have done in my work so far, and I have this sense of this whole body of work that is waiting for me to just have the time to work on it and give it my attention. And it can feel frustrating not being able to get to it faster.
But then there are other times when, in a very short space of time, all of these different things come together and are created. And, you know, it brings me back to the birth metaphor again — it’s like there are these things that we have been making in the dark.
I think a lot about — there’s a Hot Chip song called “Made in the Dark,” which I was a big fan of 20 years ago or whatever, and I think about it a lot these days. And when I think about it, I think about birth, and I think about work — we’re made in the dark. There’s all of this work happening within us, we have no idea, it’s being made in the dark, and then one day labor begins, and we’re giving birth to this thing that we had no idea was growing there for the length of time that it was.
And so there’s something about — there’s an access to this kind of deep time when we are engaged with our real work as well. And in an early voice note, I talked about the black hole perspective, where when you cross the threshold of a black hole, you no longer have any choice about your space coordinates in a black hole, you can’t help but move towards the center of the black hole, which is kind of what I think we’re doing in our work. But you can move around in time when you cross the threshold of a black hole — which is the opposite of our experience on Earth, where we can move around in space, but we have no control over the direction in time that we’re moving.
And so I think that that’s one of the things that kind of happens with our real work. It’s like we have no choice but to go in the direction of this thing, but also the rules of time don’t really seem to apply in the normal, rational sense all the time. Like, things happen very quickly sometimes, we can go to very deep places in a very short space of time. You know, if you’re inside a container that’s been held for you for a couple of days, you can go to really deep places with your work, and work through things that you might have thought would take you years or decades.
That’s one of the things that surprises me most about my work — there are some things that I have a sense of that I think, oh, I’ll get to that in maybe five or ten years. There’s some stuff that I think, oh, I can see myself in 20 years’ time going in that kind of direction. And then, without any intentional push in that direction, a short space of time will pass — maybe six months, maybe a year or two — and all of a sudden that is the direction the work has gone. And it feels very much like this is just some organic process, where I’m just watching this happen, I’m just kind of along for the ride.
And so very bizarre things happen with time when we allow ourselves to sink into our real work, and we give ourselves some pure pockets where we can focus on connecting with the deepest part of ourselves and the deepest part of our work.
So that’s what I have for you today. I think this is voice note number 20, so there is one more — I had promised myself a series of 21, so there’s one more to come. Maybe it’ll come tomorrow, maybe it’ll be a few days after that, who knows, let’s find out.
Thank you so much for listening.