From DM’s and Feeds to Drumming and Seeds: A Reflection on the Perception of Time

I said I would start a blog, so here it is. 

Good morning, familia! I’m writing to you from Union City -- la ciudad de la amnesia, where most citizens work tirelessly each day to forget where they come from, where they are, and who they are. Not me, though. Each day, I try to remember, one seed at a time.

Time. That’s a good topic to start with. 

If you’re one of my five subscribers to read this, then you probably know that I’ve deleted my Instagram. If you’re one of my close friends, then you probably know that I’ve deleted my social media multiple times a year. This time is different, though. At the turn of the new year in 2024, I wrote a resolution for myself in my journal: get off of Instagram. I had many reasons for deleting it. The most obvious: my attention. I checked Instagram constantly: after waking up, as I was waiting in line, on the toilet, in the silent spaces in conversations, before going to bed. I never gave myself a moment to just be bored. 

A not-so-obvious reason for me leaving Instagram has to do with time. The waste of time, of course, but moreso my perception of time. Have you noticed that social media and the proliferation of short videos have distorted our sense of time? Everything seems to move at lightening speed these days: news, events, pictures, information. Even my memory is shot; unless I write down, day-by-day what I do, I can’t remember things clearly, and when I have social media, many of my days seem to blur into a single, amorphous haze. What I do remember is that before I got a smartphone with social media (i.e., when I was about 20), time literally felt different. 

German-Korean author Byung Chul-Han discusses this in many of his works: the incessant fragmenting of time as the aim of neoliberal technocratic capitalism. In The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present, he writes:

We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable. They even make it accessible, like a house. They structure time, furnish it . . . 

Today, time lacks a solid structure. It is not a house but an erratic stream. It disintegrates into a mere sequence of point-like presences; it rushes off. There is nothing to provide time with any hold [Halt]. Time that rushes off is not habitable . . . 

The contemporary compulsion to produce robs things of their endurance [Haltbarkeit]: it intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption. Lingering, however, presupposes things that endure. If things are merely used up and consumed, there can be no lingering. And the same compulsion of production destabilizes life by undermining what is enduring in life. Thus, despite the fact that life expectancy is increasing, production is destroying life’s endurance. (2-4)

I had been off Instagram all of 2024, but I came back for a few months because I wanted to promote my Decolonizing the Mind Book Club (come through to the next one). My rationale was, I need Instagram to promote myself as an artist and organizer, and to create content. But in the excerpt above, Chul-Han nails it on the head: “the same compulsion of production destabilizes life by undermining what is enduring in life.” On Instagram, I was always on one or the other side of the pendulum: either mass-producing “content” out of compulsion, or consuming a “mere sequence of point-like presences” in the trance state of the infinite scroll.

Yeah, no thanks, Meta. 

So what does it take to orient myself to a more profound sense of time and memory? Chul-Han says ritual, and I agree. But what should the contents of those rituals be? Because while he argues that today’s world is “symbol-poor” (2), one could make a case that Instagram content is full of symbolic meaning that becomes part of us through repetition, even though most of us might agree that we shouldn’t internalize these symbols. 

First, I think it has to do with our senses. In his book Healing the Mind Through the Power of Story: The Promise of Narrative Psychiatry, Dr. Lewis Mehl-Madrona cites University of Auckland Professor Brian Boyd’s explanation of how we create memory:

. . . Boyd writes “We encounter the world multimodally, through our multiple sense, our emotions, our actions, and our reflections. Cognition . . . begins . . . with multimodal simulations of multimodal memories of multimodal experiences.” In short, inner experience represents the world in all the dimensions in which we experience it . . . 

According to Boyd, “Episodic memory records particular events that I remember as experienced, as mine, and can more or less locate to a specific place and time in my past, like my memory of climbing a particular rock in childhood, or breaking off a poplar branch to use as a knight’s lance.” (168-169)

Our smartphone usage is anything but multimodal: perpetual thumbflicking on a flat, two-dimensional, synthetic screen. Of course this affects how we remember! How can we possibly recall the hundreds of posts and reels we scroll through each day when there is no other sensory information to anchor our memory? In fact, our screens actively block out our senses. How many times have we seen young people (or, be honest, even ourselves) completely unaware of their surroundings because they are too occupied with their phones? The rituals we need in our lives need to be rich with sensory experiences, engaging our emotions, our sight, our smell, our touch, our hearing, and our taste, actively engaging us with where we are and who we are with. This will give us a sense of time and memory that will endure. 

Second, and perhaps most important, we need rituals that connect us to our own nature and to the Earth herself. This, here, doesn’t have to be overcomplicated either. What is our nature? To sing, to dance, to play, and to eat. And the Earth’s nature? To move in cycles. That’s why, in my life, I’ve dedicated myself to two ritual practices: bomba and growing food. 

Thanks to my ancestors, the spirits that walk with me, and my drum herself, I found bomba and the bomba family I play with. I have been playing bomba for the past seven years, first brought into the culture by my teachers Juan Cartagena and Nanette Hernandez of Segunda Quimbamba, and Dr. Drum, Melinda Gonzalez, and Wilson Lantigua of BombaYo. My deepest practice, however, has happened over the past five years through my commitment to the creation and facilitation of the New Jersey Bomba Collective. Almas bellos que son! Michi, Julio, Viannca, Hamlet, Cynthia, Clara, Nelson, Jose, Milly, Christian, Luis, Saiya, and many more!

The monthly practice of coming together with trusted and cherished community to sing, dance, and drum has deepened my sense of time. During the bombazos, my body experiences timelessness. Not the disconnected, disembodied void of scrolling, but a timelessness that unifies me with the people around me, both living and “dead.” The smells of food, bodies, perfume, and incense; the feel of sweat running down my face, chest, and arms and the pounding of my hands on the drum; the hypnotic tu-tu-tu’s and voices aligned in coro; the sight of blessed community swaying in sync around a dancer possessed by the desire to move and express themself; and the deep emotion of gratitude and joy for it all that extends beyond the batey to my entire life. These sensory experiences tie me to those around me and ground me in my heart, in my body, and in the moment. After the bombazos, my mind, heart, and soul attune themselves to the cycle: It’s almost the last Sunday of the month, and bombazo is almost here! Since 2020, my life has acquired a communal rhythm that gives me deep, satisfying meaning. 

Yet my sense of time would not be complete if I weren’t also attuned to the rhythms and cycles of the Earth, and this is one of the many reasons why I have begun to garden and grow my own food. 

In February, it’s time to start my ajicito and tobacco seeds. In March, it’s time to start my bell peppers, jalapenos, and tomatoes -- late March, though, since I learned that nightshades can grow quicker than I expect. In April, it’s time to start squash indoors and to sow arugula, calendula, and zinnias outdoors. In May, cucumbers. In June, okra. In July, August, September, harvest time. In October, prepping for to rest for December and January.

Each month has its own tasks and textures, yet it isn’t really about the month itself. It’s about being present enough for the cycles: the changes in temperature, humidity, and sunlight; the softening of the soil, budding of leaves, and sprouting of perennials; the singing of the birds, the flight of bees, and the tunneling of birds. In his essay “Relativity, Relatedness, and Reality,” renowned Sioux activist and author Vine Deloria Jr. describes how the Indigenous philosophy of seeing the universe as a interdependent web of relatives allowed people to connect deeply to the cycles of the Earth through acute observation. In one particularly poignant example, he describes how Pawnees would leave their corn crop for July and August to go hunt, yet always return in time for harvest:

We might think there was great concern about the condition of the corn crops since corn would provide the major food supply during the winter. But the tribes had already perceived plant relationships and so had what we might call "indicator plants" which told them how their corn was coming. 

The Pawnees simply examined the seed pods of the milkweed and when these pods had reached a certain condition and were at maturity, they packed up everything and headed for home, arriving in time to harvest their corn and hold a corn dance. At first glance this information seems like an interesting tidbit but has nothing to do with relatedness or relativity. ln fact the Pawnee had been able to discern, through observation or by information given to them in a ceremony, that corn and milkweed had about the same growing season. (37)

Now, let’s be real. Ancestral, ceremonial knowledge about the relationship between corn and milkweed is very different from the information I get from The Gardening Channel with James Prigioni on YouTube. Nonetheless, as I learn to garden and spend time with my plants, I do feel an impact in my body and my sense of time, however small that may be. My plant that has given me the most joy has been my tobacco, which I am growing in honor of my ancestors and memory of my Puerto Rican family who showed me bags of homegrown cured tobacco leaves when I was a teenager. I’m growing it as a prayer. A two minute morning morning feels good, but how does a prayer feel stretched out over months from seed to harvest? 

My dream is to wed these two practices over time: bomba (or communal music, more generally) and growing food. What would happen if we were to sing, drum, and dance to mark different parts of the season? The harvest? What knowledge could we learn from plants? How much better could we pass it down? How can this give us a deeper sense of meaning? These are not new questions. They have been contemplated and answered by peoples across the world who did not spend 5+ hours a day scrolling through Instagram and TikTok; peoples not just in Turtle Island, but in every continent, despite how long ago their knowledge might have been destroyed or distorted by a colonizing force; peoples who, imperfect as any human culture can be, at least knew and felt deeply where they came from, where they were, and who they were. And that’s why these questions are so relevant today. 

I start with my maraca.
I start with my tambor.
I start with my family.
I start with my community.
I start with my plants.

One seed at a time.