There are several people I know who are extraordinarily wise about time.
And about how there is always more of it.
One of these people is my marvelous uncle Svevo. One is my dear friend Hiro. One is Douglas Buchanan. One is Janet Bailey. One is Waverly Fitzgerald. And another is Cairene, one of my partners-in-crime.
Janet, Waverly and Cairene have all come to play with me at Rally (Rally!). Come to Rally. You will seriously meet the most amazing people.
Anyway, yesterday Cairene and I were talking about how we want to interact with the coming year as a year.
We were peeking at my Almanac, which is a version of the Book of You that has to do with your relationship with time. A collection of what you know about how you are at different times of the year.
But then we got stuck when it came to the quarters.
Dividing the year into quarters, that is.
It wasn’t the division part of it that was problematic though. And it wasn’t the four part of it either.
I definitely like 4s.
They’re all over the place in Shiva Nata.
And four is the seasons.
Four is the right size (for me, yes?) for allowing the year to fall into segments that I can visit and explore in depth.
But something about thinking about the year in terms of quarters was a sticking point.
So I sent up the not-a-bat signal, and called on metaphor mouse to help untangle the stuck. Here’s what happened.
What’s not working?
A reminder: We know from the “People Vary” principle that words can have intensely personal definitions. My definitions will probably differ from yours.
Any negative associations with quarter?
Let’s see. YES.
Like these:
[+fiscal] [+boring] [+forced planning] [+not creative or innovative]
[+board meetings] [+arbitrary] [+divisive]
[+incongruent] [+inorganic] [+separate from the world] [+calculated]
[+irrelevant] [+externally imposed] [+not fun!]
Reminds me of?
Having an executive calendar. Things straight people do. Things adults do.
Sitting in a leather swivel chair in uncomfortable chairs having an excruciatingly dull powerpoint presentation inflicted on me about Fiscal Reports and Annual blah blah earnings ohmygod get me out of here.
Edit! I said chairs twice! The second one was meant to be clothes but I’m keeping it as chairs because it made me laugh.
It’s definitely indoors. Fluorescent lights. Uncomfortably low ceilings. Coffee breath. Everyone is bored stiff.
I’m not sure where I have this image from because, gott sei dank, I have never been in a place like this.
On second thought, it looks like the office meeting room from Arrested Development. Got it.
What do I want?
Words and qualities that are important:
[+intuitive] [+organic] [+seasonal] [+cyclical]
[+movement] [+wholeness] [+permission] [+spaciousness]
[+belonging] [+containers/homes for things to happen in]
[+fractal flowers] [+fun!] [+anticipation]
Reminds me of?
Hmmm.
I’m out in the world. In nature. But not exposed. My senses are engaged. I’m actively present in this space.
I’m in a garden. Whoah, garden beds? There could be four of those…
No, it’s not just about the garden. There’s definitely indoor space that exists outdoors. It’s all very cozy.
So this is an estate. What does an estate have? It’s not a wing or a suite. It’s a cottage! Or a place on the estate that has both land/garden and a place to hide in.
Cairene: Yes! Because time is a dimension, not a force! You can shape it.
Me: Yeah! Exactly. You are THE BEST. Thank you for saying that in the exact right way for me.
What do I know about this new space?
Okay. There are four parts. Four places I can go on this estate. Which is mine, because it’s part of my kingdom.
And each of these spaces is connected to a season.
Each has both elements of nature and of shelter. Outdoors and indoors.
- There is a winter cabin. Is it a lodge? I’m calling it a cabin.
- The spring cottage.
- The summer gazebo.
- The fall treehouse.
These seasons do not line up with the fiscal quarters. They have their own rhythms and they echo the outdoors.
What else do I know?
I do not live in any of these places. That’s what the Humming Castle is for (sorry, I haven’t written about that yet but just assume that it is AWESOME).
But each of these spaces is the home for my plans, hopes, gwishes and mysterious projects for that particular season.
I can move about from place to place throughout the course of the year.
And get this! These … spaces have essentially become the living quarters for what I want to do in that thing that used to be called a quarter.
So I’ve gotten rid of quarters and replaced them with quarters.
(Then I had to collapse in giggles for about ten minutes.)
The useful questions.
Cairene got me thinking about useful things to ask.
Like what tools and furnishings live in each one.
What is ready and waiting for me there?
How do I mark the transition times? Are there customs that will help me exit the summer gazebo and ready myself for the fall treehouse?
And I always like to ask what would make this experience pleasurable. For me.
Because if I want a warm, peaceful relationship with time, and if I want each of the quarters to be a home for the adventures we’ll have in them, then I can’t allow that process to turn into stressful, horrible work. That would kind of defeat the purpose.
And in the meantime, I’m in the cabin. Playing. Getting to know what it’s like. So far I can tell you that it smells like pine, and there are shelves in all the right places.
Play with me! The commenting blanket fort.
Metaphor Mouse reported that he’s happy to stick around, so you’re more than welcome to use his superpowers to unpack, translate or rewrite any words you like.
We’re all working on our stuff. We make room for people to have their own experience, and we don’t tell each other how to be or what to feel.
If you would like to be on my Enthusiastic and say HOORAY for how happy I am right now about my new metaphor, that is very welcome. Or you can share a deep exhale, which is what I did when I discovered that even something as impersonal as quarters could have its own home.
Love, as always, to the commenter mice, the Beloved Lurkers and everyone who reads.
p.s. Metaphor mousing is another way to get to the practice of conscious entry. So if messing about with words appeals to you, give it a try. Or come to a Rally (Rally!), because people tend to accidentally become friends with metaphor mouse there, and it happens really easily and unexpectedly. Yay!
Follow
This reminds me of Thrae ni Erewhon (nowhere on earth, with the letters slightly rearranged) which is an amalgam of my favorite real and fictional and imaginary places, where distance is a flexible as time, and where all kinds of things are possible and can be juxtaposed. The spaces are not so much for the seasons as for mood and weather and who I want to share my internal space with. So there’s a place with a door that opens to a tropical beach and another to a snow-covered hill…
After I found your blog, I started to add Safe Rooms to this place. They differ in some ways from the other places in Thrae but it’s hard to define the differences.
Anyway, I think this is brilliant, and I look forward to reading what this inspires in other comments and what else you write about it later.
@ VickiB – that also reminds me of this magical passageway in ‘the neverending story’ – you keep chosing doors that fit your vision and then you end up in the space that fits you.
And also! the Metaphor Houses for the seasons remind me of packing away summer clothes and summer things and making the organizing box into a treasure chest for the next time you open it. The warmest mittens for winter with the ski pants and ice-skating skates. The favourite summer dresses with the big sun glasses. Things that mark the season and await you – but they have to be the nice things not the things you want to throw away.
I love the Season Houses!! I have been thinking how to make plans for next year but this idea is opening up doors of thought 🙂
*** Off to the batcave, Robin! ***
I felt a little sad when I recognized myself and where I spend most of my hours: stuck indoors with dull PowerPoints, wedged inside cube walls, fluorescent lights (aka, NO natural light) bearing down on me, everyone around me passive and bored.
I’m working toward an epiphany about What I Really Want, but it’s not ready yet.
Sometimes your words scare me, but I’m going to keep reading and letting the freedom your words shake forth see the light of day.
Man, if I had a quarter for every great metaphor I’ve encountered here… (silly pun; couldn’t resist.)
This post makes me happy. Seasonally-infused quarters feel good to me. I like to think in terms of the solstices, equinoxes and cross-quarter days, and you’ve got me thinking that there are surely ways for me to bring more of that energy into the way I shape my time and energy day-to-day, working and living.
Oh, and Cairene, if you’re reading — thank you for “time is a dimension, not a force!” That’s really helpful, inspiring, and downright elegant. I shall be a sculptor, with time as my medium!
So much sky over this. Thank you, thank you! I love all the reclaiming you do with language. I tend to just stick with my knee-jerk reaction (Ewww!!) instead of massaging and sitting beside the discomfort.
so wonderful! love this post. an Enthusuastic Yay for all the fun!
I love playing with the seasons and their energies, rituals of entering and ending. ALways feels so good to see how these mysteries unfold themselves every year, in old and new ways, and how I am part of them.
I’ve long had a magic Treehouse–like since I was 3 or 4, and it still is my safest of safe rooms. The otehr night i started drawing and unpacking its many rooms and suites and spaces. Wow. So much to discover there.
So many delicious lil mysteries opening up.
I was just thinking this morning (ha!) about how well my goals for 2011 worked for me. Instead of resolutions (=revolutions=extreme=harsh=inflexible), having a goal I wanted to work toward was a good one for me. So, 2012,, what if I think about in terms of seasons. What do I want to accomplish or move toward (move is much better than work!) for each season. That way I can think in comprehensible groups, as a year is a long time to conceive of! I can also make changes I need as relate to the actual time. It’s super-hot in the summer, so I might want my car a/c work done in the spring. Things like that. And feel connected to the earth in my life. Most excellent. And other excitement exclamations! This metaphor is good for lots of stuff!
I think I didn’t realize (until I started reading this post) that I don’t much like the word “quarter” – for some reason, my mind went right to the phrase “drawn and quartered” … plus there’s all the official-stuff-ness of the word (which I mostly associate with financial doings – quarterly reports and all that).
Enthusiastic hooray for new metaphors! LOVE the cabin, cottage, gazebo, and treehouse.
I need to come up with a metaphor for ‘deadline’ …
I’ve been planning to make a book-type-thing with helpful hints for me throughout the year, so it’s cool that you are doing the same sort of thing! And I love that it’s called an almanac.
@Kathleen — a quarter! Oho! Haha! I liked that 🙂
A big glittery enthusiastic HOORAY for this new metaphoring of seasons and quarters. I love the different cabins and cottages for the seasons. This is very much in synch with how my mind works. One of my favorite things about the winter cabin is how it contains excitement and anticipation for future seasons. For example, all my seed catalogs are delivered there, so I can dream about spring and summer and dirt and picking peas whenever I please.
And I wish I could transmit the perfect winter cabin picture here, because I have a lake cabin in mind that I’ve been to — it has deep window seat beds, and an endless supply of firewood. And a tiny perfect-size kitchen. And plaid things everywhere. And board games and unlikely books and many many beds. Extra feather blankets everywhere. You can look out at the lake and see if it’s iced over enough to skate or slip around on. And you can snowshoe to your neighbors when you feel like visiting, or you can stay beautifully perfectly alone. Or you can invite your best friends and have a cocoa fest and stay up late with just the lanterns to light your way. Oh I have big love in my heart for this cabin, many good memories there. If I magically transport it just a little closer to Oregon, it also has a mudroom full of perfect warm gigantic coats, and boots you don’t think will fit until they do, and always the perfect warm hat and mittens.
I’m also reminded of a favorite book by Charles de Lint, where he writes about a magical house that is actually many houses joined together, and in the secret space in their shared yard is a magic forest that connects to all forests. And this kind of shifting time space is how I think of the season spaces, too. They connect to the other landscapes we’ve known. Somehow that seems very, very important (to me).
Is the humming of the Humming Castle connected with the humming we did at the end of the Shiva Nata class in Boulder? Because that humming was just about the best thing ever and it was so good I have not spoken aloud about it and I don’t want to…
OH! The best thing.
THank you, Havi, for teaching us to be exquisitely sensitive to our intuitive responses to all words, persistently reminding us that there are options.
My brain went to the pirate meaning of quarters first, silly brain 🙂 Huzzah for the cabin, cottage, gazebo, and treehouse!
I LOVE THIS. And I love the tiny graphic of Metaphor Mouse AWWWW <3
o,Havi! I love this! You know I’ve been teaching people to for years to use seasons to sort out what to do in time. I like them because they’re flexible, you get to define when a season begins and ends by what is happening in nature and in your mood (not what the weathermen say) and also because everyone has a different relationship with the seasons based on history and climate. But this is even better! I love houses so I love the idea of time as a place. I’m going to start outfitting my quarters as I do my gwishing for the year ahead. Thanks so much for this!
When I read quarters, I thought of the quarters of a city (though then it’s in the french form quartier). That might be good as a metaphor too. Like Summer would be down by the river with a blanket and picnic spread on the riverbank.
Personally I love the symmetrical structure of a calendar as a circle divided into equal parts, kind of like a yearly mandala.
This is beautiful. I have this huge goofy grin. I am enthused!
The image that comes to my mind for transitions between seasons is a stone path (like in a Japanese garden – one of my favorite places ever). Because then you can skip along them and call them skipping stones! whee!
http://pinterest.com/pin/275634439663773296/
! love !