Editor's Letter

Two years ago, I officiated at a wedding that was held on a beach. Following the ceremony, as guests were mingling and relocating to the reception, a number of us noticed a group of people, hundreds of yards down the beach. Wordlessly, pairs of guests left to observe, drawn towards something unknown — as if under a spell. A shared mood of aimlessness and drift also carried me, but I couldn't put words to the reason in that moment. Some events gather time around themselves in a very particular way. Weddings celebrate a hopeful imagined future while at the same time linking us to ancient traditions. This stretching of time forward and back alters consciousness of time just enough that the world opens out rather than closes in.

Experiences of timelessness — the way events in dreams can exist together without temporal succession — is central to Freud's understanding of the unconscious. When “after” is felt to be no different from “at this moment” or “before,” awareness of time sequence disappears. Typically, events are experienced as moving in sequential and linear succession, from past to future, a model of time the Greeks called kronos. Chronological time is built into thinking and language. Words such as “progress” and “acceleration” aim in the direction of the future, while “re-enactment” and “repetition” anticipate a future where the past will get re-experienced in the present. However, it is possible to imagine a world with meaning separate from clock time because all measures of chronological time — cosmic time, calendar time, historical time — are unrelated to psychic experience and the rhythms and internal flow of the individual unconscious.

Another Greek concept, kairos, doesn't ask what time it is, but rather, what is time for? It describes a moment of opportunity to attend or follow what arises from within, outside of the constraints of chronological time and, in this way, links to natural rhythms, serendipity, ritual, creativity, and transformation. Experienc