Time is not linear but it might be real.

Someone wrote on a wall in a public toilet, "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once."

You have Grace and Ceridwen to thank for this bit of playfulness. They were musing about time, about the spiral nature of time, the possibility that everything happens at the same time and we only impose order and linearity as a way to create sense out of chaos. So I decided to play visually with that idea.

That's me in 1977, dreaming of love, cut out and superimposed on a postcard of the Museu de Alberto Sampaio in Guimaraes, Portugal. Jose Saramago called that museum the most beautiful in the world, so when I first went to Portugal in 2006, I had to see if I agreed with him. Tucked away in that little museum, in an alcove in a barely-lit room, I found a marble sculpture created in about 1500, of a Portuguese person. I stood in front of that sculpture and felt I was falling in love. I begged to be allowed to take a photograph, but no, they were very strict. I came back to the USA and wrote to the museum of my love for this little object, and they sent me a jpeg of it in an email but made me promise never to post it anywhere.

In 2011, when I met Sue (whose father was Portuguese), I recognized her as the living embodiment of that sculpture. I fell in love all over again. And so time is a spiral, and it's all happening at once.

And here's a little love song about what's real by Meshell Ndegeocello and Toshi Reagon, for those who wonder about it.

P.S. After I posted this, my friend Devorah sent me this delicious version:

Time exists so that everything doesn't happen all at once.
Space exists so that everything doesn't happen just to you.
--Attributed to Susan Sontag.