Discontinuities
Timeline breaks, sudden shifts
Start digging in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, and the soil will gradually change texture. Topsoil will fade into a deep clayey silt deposited by cataclysmic ice age floods, and below that you will find older and older sediments. In some parts of the valley these sedimentary stories extend for half a mile below ground, reaching back hundreds of thousands of years until finally there is solid bedrock: basalt or mudstone dating to tens of millions of years - a time long before humans but when life on Earth would have looked quite familiar: forests, grasslands, birds, insects, diversifying mammals.
Start digging in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, and after a thin layer of topsoil your shovel will hit rock. Gneiss, garnet schist, amphibolite, metagraywacke. Former seafloor sediments alchemized and recrystallized in the roots of ancient mountains. Ask these rocks their age - whether through clairvoyance or advanced geophysics - and their answer will boggle the mind. 1.1 billion years. Four times older than the first dinosaurs. Twice as old as the first plants and animals on land. These rocks were formed at a time when Earth would have appeared to be a barren planet of rock and river and ocean, when microscopic organisms in the oceans were just beginning to learn the art of multicellularity.
It is not that the missing years are compressed into a microscopic band, a few Jurassic atoms waiting to be noticed. Those hundreds of millions of years - most of the story of life on Earth - are simply absent: a discontinuity in time, a contact between present and prehistory. The soils and rocks on which the dinosaurs walked, in this region, were thousands of feet above our heads, lifted skyward by continental collision and then gradually washed to the sea. Bone and branch and mineral alike long since returned to the timeless cauldron of creation: salt in the ocean, grains of sand on beaches, carbon cycling through rock and atmosphere and living cells.
My father moved to my childhood home in the Minnesota River Valley in 1978. Nineteen seventy-eight is a year that does not exist in my embodied, experienced timeline, just as the year 2026 is not a part of his Earth story.
However certain we are that we are more than mortal beings - whether through belief or trust or inner knowing or experiences of stepping out of our bodies and between dimensions - the fact remains that our existence before our birth into this life and after our death lies across a boundary, a veil, a discontinuity. It is easy for me to imagine why embodiment might work this way. How many of us would choose to be all in, to be all here, to lean in to our senses and emotions and choices, if a thousand past-life memories were as vivid and present as our childhoods and first loves, if our time embodied felt more like a game-world or a dream-world than the entirety of our existence?
We experience a version of this, as well, when we up-root and re-root ourselves, when we step into and out of place-based timelines. Where I will soon be moving, the collective experience of Hurricane Helene in late 2024 is a defining event: a time when anyone living in the mountains felt that any moment might be their last, when boundaries between stream and earth and boulder and forest dissolved in unstoppable flows that destroyed houses and roads and bridges and power lines. A time when communities came together across differences and divides to share and survive and rebuild. In my timeline, I spent those same hours and days camped at the Conscious Growth Convergence, 2600 miles distant, dancing and singing late into the calm, clear night beneath Taurus and Jupiter. The videos of raging rivers that appeared on screens might as well have been transmissions from beyond the veil or from another planet, until I actually set foot on the scoured streambeds and empty foundations, until I began weaving myself into the story of place that holds this memory.
Sometimes the most profound shifts, the most profound discontinuities in our lives are not outwardly visible. In my own experience, the most defining moments have not been marked by birth or death or illness or trauma, and I am curious to know whether this is also true for others.
December 13 and December 19, 2023. Amidst relative outward calm, I entered a state of building tension, mental fog, emotion, deep longing. And, on each of these days, walking the same trail, I felt the tension resolve, felt a part of myself return, enter my body, integrate into my experience. First a feminine, playful, deeply sensing aspect. Then a masculine, monk-like, calmly present aspect. I emerged different, deeply changed, slowly rediscovering myself.
December 11, 2024. Although my partner and I had discussed separating before, on some level she was still my person, my family. An intense, painful spiritual and emotional process on this day culminated in the release of this attachment, in a state of calm and deeper self-awareness within which a choice to part ways became possible. Within which I no longer wanted or needed to be chosen by another in the same way.
January 29, 2026. This one was a bit more subtle and perhaps less confined to a single day, but after walking 50+ miles through the Blue Ridge Mountains and connecting to land and community, something in me began to shift from visiting to belonging. A solo hike through what felt like a deeply enchanted landscape on this day felt particularly like a turning point of this process, which would feel complete a few days later.
The first of these discontinuities was the most jarring, the most surprising to me, as I had no memory of shifting, rebirthing, becoming a new person like this - at least as an adult. Within friendships and relationships I was always the stable one, the steady hand. To surrender, trust, allow, explore my new self without judgment or questioning my sanity, was a challenge. And yet I felt calm, whole, settled inside.
Each of these shifts re-set my experience of time passing, in a way. Each marked a before and after in my memories with everything before seeming surprisingly distant, even if it had only been a few days or weeks or months.
To be like water is usually to flow, to surrender and discern and weave in a winding but continuous path from headwaters to ocean, from birth to death. But to be like water is also, sometimes, to leap over a rock ledge and tumble freely through the air to a new stream below. Or to shift, in an instant, from ice to liquid, from liquid to vapor: forms so different that we would not believe them to be the same substance if we could not witness their transformations.
Moving through discontinuities is a dance of depth, surrender, detachment.
Depth to know that there is still, on some level, continuity. That the billion-year-old metamorphic bedrock and the fifty-year-old tulip tree above it are both tissues of our living planet, different arrangements of the same original elements. That our souls move through the portals of birth and death and have done so many times. That even as our identities and worldviews and loves and attachments shift, we are still ourselves, still coherent, still whole. That snowflakes and the steam in our breath and raindrops and rivers are all water.
Surrender and detachment to be willing to let go. To let go of identities that are falling away. To let go of a need to control, and even to understand, with our minds. To let go of that which feels safe, secure, comfortable. To let go of those who are dying, or who are no longer in resonance with us as partners, as family, as friends.
It is possible to become attached to detachment. Having gone through the pain of letting go, having stepped into a deeper perspective, it can be tempting to stay there, saving ourselves from needing to let go again, in the future, by - as Garth Brooks would say - standing outside the fire.
I have felt some of this, in myself, over the past months and years, but in this moment I am feeling newfound excitement for moving back into immersion. For connecting with a new place and community. For opening to new love and friendship. For launching creative endeavors. Perhaps I have passed through this series of waterfalls, of discontinuities, and it is time to flow again, as a new river, the same and yet different.
This will be my last post from Oregon, as I leave in a little over a week. I am most grateful for the way that this valley has held and nurtured me for the last 17 1/2 years, and I look forward to many future visits. I will always, I think, feel a sense of belonging here, as I still feel in the Minnesota River Valley.
Happy Equinox everyone!
I like the term discontinuity as I often ponder my perception of time and myself and how they change with the circumstances of my life.
I still remember a discontinuity form early in my life, when I was toward the beginning of my teenage years. Although it was toward the end of a fairly rough school year, nothing in particular happened on or around that day that I could name as a trigger for this discontinuity, but I remember it felt like something had abruptly changed inside me, and everything beforehand seemed a bit hazy, like it was in some sense a different life. I still remember the date, May 22, 1999.
I never again experienced a discontinuity of nearly that level. I know it happened during a time in my life when a lot of things are rapidly changing, but it felt very different from all the normal changes. It was strange enough that I still remember it to this day, and I've never heard anyone else name this experience until now.
I also resonate with many of your thoughts about embodiment and spirituality. I do remember having times when I was a child where I felt frustrated that I couldn't remember anything from before my birth, feeling that there was something there but not accessible. Later I became fascinated by stories of people who remembered past lives, as well as phenomena like neard death experiences. I still think those things are interesting, but I've backed away from trying to rely on such things as a source of hope. I realized that it felt like the wrong thing to try to rely on for my well-being, it felt like I needed to immerse myself in life and my physical body rather than look for a source of "rescue" from it that so many religious and secular ideologies promise and seemed always just out of reach.
The interesting thing is, feeling myself as embodied gives me a sense of connection that I'd never gotten from common spiritual ideas. It feels like my body is part of the greater "body" of the land and ecosystems, not just in in an intellectual sense but a sense that can be felt as in the discussion on your previous post. I do wonder how much of the anxiety and fear in our culture has its roots in the way people think of their bodies as mere machinery, which isolates them from this source of interconnection? My love of the natural world goes way back, but it was much later in that If started to realize that exploring the inner world is exploring nature as well. It's not a substitute for exploring the nature that's outside one's self but it's complementary.
I really don't know what my beliefs are about a lot of the existential questions, but I think society puts too much emphasis on belief. Often there's a huge discrepancy between people's stated beliefs and their actions, and often people don't even seem to notice. I wonder if much of that can be traced to the common paradigm of separation of the mind from the whole being. I tend to pay more attention to people's actions and general ways of being then to stated beliefs which can so often be used as a way of feeling superior without actually leading to changes of action. I know for myself that paying attention to my experience and trying my best to live in a way that makes sense has also brought quite a bit of benefit to my inner life, despite there being a lot of questions that my answer is "I don't know" or "I can only guess".
Thank you yet again, Markael, for helping me to think and see in new ways.