💌 Invitation to Regenerative Time
Towards a relationship with time that enables wise innovation
**Enrollment now open for School of Wise Innovation’s 🌸 Spring Cultivator starting April 3rd!**
Fellow travelers,
One of the most central explorations at School of Wise Innovation has to do with our relationship with time.
Because if one of the primary things that inhibits wise innovation is a constant sense of urgency and impulse for speed, then it’s worth exploring the calendar and stories that cultivate such dynamics, and how we might rhythm our lives differently.
How are we going to create a regenerative world if we don’t even know how to regenerate ourselves?
Through a series of conversations with Rev. Sara Jolena Wolcott of Sequoia Samanvaya, and several rounds with the temporal technology she developed called Circular Time, we've been inquiring:
What kind of calendar system would support living, working, and creating with greater harmony?
One piece that has emerged is this notion of Regenerative Time as a sabbatical rhythm at all time scales. i.e. not only switching up the vibes at least once a week like Shabbat, but also once an hour, day, month, year, and seven years.
Because if we don’t take regular fallow time to pause and tend to that which regenerates ourselves (let alone our soil and societies), then we’ll inevitably make poor choices from a place of wound, illness, and fear instead of wholeness, health, and love.
Orienting to time in these ways not only reconnects us to natural ecological cycles, but also creates placeholders to fill with the rituals and practices that help regenerate our lives and projects.
What kinds of activities regenerate you at different time scales?
🤯 Calendars Inform Consciousness
The reason we’re spending so much time on time at the School is because it’s one of those subtle layers of cultural operating system that we take for granted, yet massively informs how we think, speak, and act. Individually, organizationally, and collectively.
Sara Jolena describes how every calendar system has a cosmovision (worldview that explains the order of the universe and humanity's place within it).
Not all cosmovisions are regenerative. Many are actually deeply extractive. The Modern West is dominated by a “Clock Time” that is deeply linear, productivity and progress-oriented.
Clock Time derives its linearity from Christianity with its End of Days cosmology (time will end), scientific and cultural notions of progress, a universalizing calendar system that enables global coordination, and colonization —> industrialization expecting round-the-clock production.
This is not to say that universal time systems are not valuable. Coordination across time zones and large numbers of people is possible in part because of highly precise and shared temporal rhythms (we love planes landing on time!). Some degree of linearity and universality is highly useful. However, too much linearity can and has gotten us into some serious challenges.
Importantly, linear calendars fail to acknowledge cycles, at both the universality level (cosmological time in terms of the moon and the Sun) and the local level (the rhythms of animals and plants, ecosystems and culture).
Which renders them very far away from being able to bring ancient living wisdom into daily life and critical business decisions, as they take us away from our place in space instead of reifying it.
In contrast, regenerative societies align with what Sara Jolena and others calls “Earth Time.”
”It is near-impossible to have a regenerative society that is not aligned with Earth Time.” - Sara Jolena Wolcott
To reiterate, the idea is not just to reject the linear calendar, but to integrate the best pieces of the linear and circular.
Progress need not come at the expense of rejuvenating cycles, or vice versa. We want a cyclical process to complement our linear process, yin to complement yang, reflection and regeneration to balance productivity and meeting deadlines.
💌 Invitation to Experiment
School of Wise Innovation is exploring where in our project cycles and ecological cycles we can infuse qualities of time that enable more regenerative processes and initiatives.
We haven’t fully adopted this Regenerative Time sabbatical rhythm, but we’ve had some good experiences experimenting with different pieces, and want to invite you into this journey with us.
For example, we're playing with the idea of a "Natural Vacation Policy" in which on every new and full moon, we have the day blocked off for embodied ethics practices, creative workflows and relevant reflection questions.
“Changing how we conceptualize, illustrate, work within, and relate with time is an immense opportunity. Calendars, as temporal technologies, are key places where we can do that.” - Sara Jolena Wolcott
While it has been quite empowering to re-calibrate our relationship with time and express our creative power in how we design our lives and work, it does take a lot of active work and thought, because the dominant culture won't do it for us.
But it can be easier together. So we invite you to join us in illuminating the shortcomings of the current system, remembering temporal technologies from deep traditions, and crafting new ways of working with time. We have a small WhatsApp group going for those who are especially interested.
Food for thought:
What are the stories your calendar(s) is telling about what is or isn’t valued?
In developing new shared calendars, how can we reconcile differences across geographies and lifestyles and worldwide views?
In an era of climate change where we can predict more regular disruption, how can we build in buffers and spaciousness? Create time for grief and acknowledging what is lost? Think about productivity in a more expansive way?
💭 Reflection from Sara Jolena:
This is such an important time to be engaging with the meta-questions of how do we engage with time? Most people don’t get very many chances to think alongside others about their relationship to time itself, and how we are creating our calendars. Businesses, regardless of their size, tend to adapt default calendars without thinking about the potential consequences on how those calendar systems impact their employees, workflow, and the ways in which they are able to live out their own values and, especially, to find deeper harmony with the cycles of the Earth.
Time is connected to place, for all that our calendars, abstract as they are, tend to take us away from the particularities of microclimates, local ecosystems, and the impact of climate change on our calendars.
For most people, a great place to start is to gain facility in understanding various aspects of the cyclical nature of time, and how that impacts your work patterns and larger life patterns. Much can be revealed through this. Doing so can be part of a decolonial process.
And then there is the critical question that I recall Andrew asking me several years ago: What does a calendar for a regenerative economy look like?
I loved this question then and I love it now. The School of Wise Innovation is doing something really important here by lifting up how innovators relate to time itself as well as to calendar systems as part and parcel of both “what is wisdom”, “what is wise innovation” and, “what does it mean to be engaged in study towards wise innovation.”
What might a calendar for a regenerative economy/society look like is a huge question. It deserves many experiments. Rarely do innovators and leaders ask: “what experiences of time enable regeneration?” or, “What kinds of social structures (aka calendars) can we create together to enable societies and economies that are regenerative?” And yet without engaging with our calendar systems and their cosmovisions (as well as what we put into our calendar), we risk replicating wider patterns that don’t embed spaciousness into the design process.
Whilst every person has their own way of engaging with time - something deeply influenced by our different neurologies, bodies, histories, positionality, and the ecosystems in which we live - and whilst some people have a lot of agency over their calendars, our calendars are also very much social technologies. This does not work only for individuals, although it is a place where individuals have a lot of abilities to influence things. Social and labor movements have long understood that our calendars shape our lives and that should be determined by the collective, not just a few elite groups of people. That is part of why we now have weekends and a 5 day work week: labor organizers and people of faith came together to move industrial leaders away from unreasonable modes of production.
To move towards a regenerative society, we will once again need to create new calendar systems. As I’ve been working with different organizations and networks of organizations, it’s exciting to see how much people are interested in having this conversation, and in using these practical tools to move into different ways of working, creating, and practicing together.
🌸 Spring Cultivator Begins in 3 weeks!
If these are the kind of explorations that speak to you, then you may appreciate our upcoming Spring Cultivator cohort of founders and changemakers listening to what Life on Earth is inviting us to learn and practice.
Our spring theme is Collective Wayfinding: Sensing • Sensemaking • Storytelling • Sangha.
1-3 hours/week of weekly interactive workshops with seasoned wayfinders and Practice Room sessions to shape your vision, alongside a growing community of exceptional humans dedicated to integrating their inner work with their work in the world.
We’re hosting an Info Session next Wed March 26th featuring School for Seasonal Living’s Belinda Liu.
Those who sign up for Spring Cultivator will also get access to recordings from Winter Cultivator.
It’s about time 🤭
With great gratitude,
Andrew Dunn
School of Wise Innovation
p.s. Did you know this is how the solar system moves through the galaxy?!
In Bali there is a construct of time that is a thousand years old based on the lunar calendar that uses 10 cycles of time to determine the quality of each person and each day that the priests use to determine when to marry, plant crops and hold ceremony as well as dozens of other considerations.
I have been studying the Wariga here since 2017 and operate by it daily. The relationship to time is as a living entity that we are enfolded into. Deeply rewarding and fascinating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pawukon_calendar
Great post, and so needed!