I saw an Instagram reel a while ago which showed a chat between some colleagues about how they visualised calendars. Some people pictured a ‘traditional' calendar month with each row as a week and columns for the days. Others saw a circle, with the months split into segments like a pie chart, while others saw a complicated looping system where months seemed to be grouped seasonally and then looped in and out almost like an infinity symbol.
When I try to visualise time, I'm not sure now which way is organically mine and whether my way has been informed by the video. I think I see a more traditional format but maybe more simple, each month a block from left to right starting in January and bouncing rightwards, ‘forwards in time’.
On a deeper level, I wonder if time is really linear. I think maybe how we understand time is relative to the timescale we're imagining. The timeline of a day stretches out forwards in front of me while a lifetime is made up of snapshots of memories and imaginings of the future. When I was a younger adult, I used to see my current self in the middle holding hands with my child self on the left and my much older self on the right. It felt comforting.
A few years ago, when my daughter was 4 months old we went on a learning retreat hosted by the Centre for Human Ecology and Life Mosaic! which hosted 2 educators from the Misak indigenous people of Colombia. They introduced us to the Plan de Vida (Life Plan) which was a community-led plan “for self-determined development on their territory”. During the retreat they introduced us to their cultural imagining of time as non-linear but as a spiral. The way I remember it is as if each complete turn of the spiral, if viewed from above as a 2D shape, represented a year, but that if viewed from the side, the spiral line continued downwards, like a drawing of a tornado. They also told us that in Misak culture, children are associated or more connected to the past and elders to the future. Why? Elders are further along life's timeline and children have just begun it. This still kind of blows my mind. Coming from a culture that marginalises older people and uses phrases such as “the children are the future” as major campaign taglines and which desperately prioritises the future (future economic growth, future projections, shiny newness), the idea that our elderly could hold the key to what's to come seems alien. But even in writing this, I'm realising that my western interpretation of this has hidden another reflection.. that having elders as connected to the future doesn't necessarily prioritise them over children and the past, but that both are valid, needed, essential. In spiral time, we don't move onwards and away from the past… we continually cycle back.
About 6 years later I attended an online workshop about spiral time and neurodivergence hosted by the Glasgow Zine Library which “explore alternative values of rest, slowness, cyclicality, and confront ideas that often plague our lives about ‘wasted time’ and ‘feeling behind’ and needing to ‘catch up.’” The session again highlighted how both linear time and time as a resource were both rooted in industrial Capitalism and how, for neurodiverse and disabled people who often experience challenges and barriers to engaging with dominant time narratives, these are inaccessible and generate shame and stress.
(Wow, what a ramble and I still haven't written about food for this piece of writing on a project about food.)
Over the last couple of weeks at Possobilities, we've been mapping events on a circle calendar. While I don't visualise time in my mind's eye like this, I really like this method for representing repetition throughout a year. I thought that this would be familiar to much of the group but I was surprised that this was new to most people I spoke with. It wasn't that I thought people should be aware of this approach but more that I forget that my position as an artist and thinker (whatever) has given me access to alternative ways of approaching things. We've mapped the group’s birthdays and significant events such as Easter, Christmas, Halloween and bank holidays and found foods which we use to celebrate: Christmas dinner and pudding, chocolate eggs, picnics and toffee apples. Later, we've mapped the months in which different fruits, vegetables and legumes are sown, planted out and harvested.
I wanted to do this as an exercise to question whether seasonal food cycles are as fixed as we think they are. As an ADHDer, I've often avoided growing my own food because of challenges with time management. If I forget to sow the seeds in the month I'm meant to, is there any point? Will the plant even grow? I find that people who are seeking to challenge capitalist and industrial notions of time and pressure often look to nature for inspiration on more organic ways to live. But for those of us with bodies and minds who face challenges with even ‘natural’ time patterns, do organic cycles actually feel more freeing?
Thinking back to the session in spiral time at the Zine Library, I believe that the framing of time as a resource (time is money!) further detaches us from a sense of agency and autonomy over our own time. How many of us get to choose at what time we start and finish work, eat our meals, or even socialise? Perhaps this feeds into food systems and how we connect to them too. As a beginning of a thought, some notes:
We literally do not have the time to engage with food and land beyond shopping for ingredients and cooking meals. Therefore the idea of fixed, natural time cycles which can pass by in the blink of an eye feels stressful (I have FOMO for sowing seasons…)
Food becomes a resource similar to time: something to ‘fill a hole’, valued for its nutritional benefit or simply because it removes hunger. We are forcibly detached from connecting with food and land in deeply emotional and spiritual ways or by using embodied wisdom
In an extension to point 2, food is seen as a finite resource. We are taught to eat everything that is on our plate, to not waste food… I feel guilty at throwing out food I’ve left to turn. This guilt only further serves to create a separation between me and food.
For neurodiverse and disabled people living under industrial capitalism, food can become overwhelming both in its texture and taste and in the time it takes to prepare and consume. When our days are already so overloaded with sensory information, the acts of cooking and eating can become overwhelmingly impossible.
Absolutely very likely not a new idea in the world, but food systems and time as conceptualised under industrial capitalism seem to be intrinsically linked.
I have realised that throughout my life I've always been confused by the notion of ‘harvest time’... At primary school we would sometimes do a harvest play in the Autumn term (core memory is accidentally kicking the cardboard scythe with my cardboard chicken costume feet across the stage). I ‘learnt’ that this was the time when food came off the fields and into… where? I had no idea what happened to that food once the tractors had plucked it. Harvest was an autumn word, a rusty orange, golden brown like turned soil in the light of a low sun. Now I wonder, what does it mean to celebrate harvest if we don't also know how to store and save food and instead do our shopping in supermarkets where everything is available all year round?
In mapping the sowing and harvesting months of many many veggies I'm seeing that ‘harvest’ isn't just an autumn thing. Foods of different kinds are harvested all year around. I’ve mapped these onto a radar chart and we can see that with a selection of 39 seeds from Sow Seeds, harvests happen in every month of the year. Rocket in December, tomatoes as early as May. Harvest is also deep leaf green and juicy red.
Today, we added another ‘dataset’ to the circle time map: festivals and celebrations throughout the celtic calendar (The Celtic Journey). The summer and winter solstice (longest and shortest days), imbolc, marking the midpoint between winter and spring, bealtaine on the 1st May which is now also International Workers Day. In doing so, I learnt that on this celtic calendar are 3 harvest celebrations: lughnasadh, on 1st August which celebrates the early grain harvest, mabon aligned with the autumn equinox, which celebrates the 2nd harvest and samhain on 31st October which celebrates the final harvest before the long winter and which also marks the beginning of the new year in many pagan traditions. This feels so much more comfortable to me, so much less pressured and rushed. In looking at this calendar I can see a sense of abundance as opposed to scarcity.
Circular diagram with three concentric coloured bands signifying the Meteorological, Astronomical and Celtic calendars. The outer circumference is divided into the twelve months of the year and also indicates the solstices and equinoxes for the northern hemisphere, and the four Celtic festivals of Bealtaine, Lunasa, Samhain and Imbolc. The northern hemisphere seasons are represented in each of the three bands as red for summer, yellow for autumn, blue for winter and green for spring. The colours shift between the bands indicating different measures of where the seasons start and end for each calendar.
Astronomical seasons are based on the position of the Earth in relation to the sun, whereas meteorological seasons are based on the annual temperature cycle. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association)
However, flowing just beneath the surface of this mapping and discovery is a niggling question about the climate emergency. After a baltic cold snap in Glasgow with temperatures dropping to -8℃ at the beginning of January, by this week they’d jumped to 12℃, unusually warm for this time of year when January averages of 2℃ - 6℃. We already know that global food systems are facing devastating effects as a result of changing climates, these changes themselves majorly impacted by the very global industrial agricultural food complexes we’ve come to rely on. Will this totally throw the map we have made out of relevance?
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