分类: Consciousness

On time travel, past lives, and arriving home wherever I go

6/4/2026

I MEET TIME TRAVELERS because I’m also a time traveler and I know one when I see one. It’s always been obvious to me that we’re traveling through each other’s timelines and dreams but it’s not always obvious how to name, frame or claim it. And who would believe me, anyway?

Once I met a time traveler in a trench coat in Harvard Yard. I asked him point-blank if he’d come directly from the distant past and he quickly confirmed my suspicion with an affirmative wink. And so we walked the grounds while he talked to me about where he’d come from and what he’d seen and I offered to buy him a refreshing iced tea at a nearby cafe, where we sat outside and this was not a date.

It was more like an encounter with a comet.

There are so many time travelers in Cambridge, if you know where to look, they’ll find you. They usually roam around with messages for us, to carry backward into the past, or onward into the near or distant future. Like that guy with the gnarly nose who sat in front of the Appian Way cafe with the great raspberry muffins, I think his name was Clifford, if I’m not mistaken.

He and I had many conversations that centered around biblical passages, mostly because the man had memorized the entire book and could speak directly to the word of god as it related to this or that circumstance, this so impressed me. He stunk like sour fruit and his fingernails were thick with black dirt, and it was hard to withstand a long talk, but I always made time for Clifford’s revelations—he told me he was visiting from the future—and that I was a good-enough receiver of his word.

This is how it’s always gone and goes for me. I walk into a village on the border of then and now and I’m greeted like a long-lost member of the tribe, given hot tea with honey and a pastry that required endless kneading, folding, spreading, patting, rolling and thinning and baking, before the form filled into its intended future—so sweet, so savory, so satisfying.

And I’m always welcomed home, wherever I am, whenever I arrive, the message is always, thank you for coming, let us feed you and make you a space on the mat, and tell us what you’ve come to realize now that you’ve been out on the road for so long, tell us what we needed to know all along.
I rarely have the clarity of consciousness to say where I’ve been or why I’ve returned, but a past-life therapist helped me reveal to myself that I’ve been a sacred scribe in several lives, and that comes as no surprise.

My speciality is scrolls, and not the doom kind, but divine. I’ve stared down at my feet wearing sandals that are not mine now but they were then and Jews believe that god always places our feet where we are supposed to walk.

At first, I denied the possibility of the clarity of this transmission. I must be making this up, I said to the therapist, a way to reach out to my hidden selves and bring myself in for a while from the cold, welcome my own self home, the integrated being that I strive to be in this particular life time. But she said no, this was not a self-generated dream from the inner soul machine, this was a stepping out of one timeline and into another, to catch another wave of experience.

And so with this, I have no choice but to believe in any sort of mystical documentation that attests to the bending of time toward the infinite and the vertical, spiral-bound and intertwined, each and every one of us. You don’t have to see yourself as a time traveler to move between and betwixt, but once you do, it all becomes much easier to get up and go when you have to, or decide to stay and rest when the bones know they’ve found a good place to land.

I bought this clock once at the thrift store. It told time in poetry—the arms spinning backwards, forever. It made a humming sound, a buzzing. The clock tumbled toward itself, remembering. The day, forever beginning again.

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On containing consciousness, setting scenes, and interviewing the self

6/3/2026

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Arches National Park, Utah.

GOD MADE THE WORLD from nothing but the nothingness shines through, according to Paul Valéry via the professor in Transcription, by Ben Lerner, whose latest book boggles the brain. The way time bends and memory moves like water can feel unmanageable, I suppose the way all great fiction could feel.

(Note, I never said should).

I also said I would stop writing these morning missives because they squeeze too much creative juice out of my lemon of a brain and I need to save some of this energy for an edit that’s due back to a hypnotherapist any day now. But after I close a chapter, I feel like these writing sessions have become like a brain rinse and so here’s what I have for you today.

(Note, I do not know the you I speak to).

We pour reality into all kinds of containers—conversations, plays, books, interviews—each offers the artifice of a timestamp. Let me share the best tip I ever got for conducting an interview with a source: repeat the first question as the last. That’s because you’re usually not listening to the response when you first ask it, the two of you, just settling into the body odor and eye color of the other, the fact of their flesh.

(Note, let’s go back to the very beginning and see what you recall).

If I were interviewing myself, I would begin by asking about my mother. “Tell me more about that long drive to Florida,” I’d ask myself. “Tell me more about the time you stained the wall with a purple ink pen,” I’d ask again. “Tell me more about why you insisted on leaving again and again,” I’d ask. I wouldn’t remember the first question I asked myself, nor certainly the last.

(Note, I’m terrible with transcription, poets should never be trusted to function as journalists).

I will make a scene for you: Picture me at the age of fifteen sitting atop a rocky cliff at Arches National Park. I’m wearing a white T-shirt with the print of a Blackfeet leader on the front, a pair of Levis, brown suede Birkenstocks, embroidered bracelets on my wrists. I’m studying archaeology that summer in Cortez, on a weekend trip in Utah, with other diggers. I’m reeling from the feeling of effortless belonging outside of time and space, a feeling of communion with the clouds. I’ve just learned how to meditate. I whittled a cigarette out of bamboo. I beaded a red heart onto a leather pouch. I kept a diary. I hiked on trails with mountain lions and wrote letters home about it.

(Note, these are conceits borrowed from Lerner, this is how writers learn to read and write).

Feelings tether us to mortality. We feel nothing without the boomerang clang and thunder of our existence, the static of our existential dread. And so we feel cold and sad and must get warm and happy, which usually involves food—and good company. And something even the engineers of artificial consciousness can’t deny—love, the ultimate substance.

(Note, I’m reading a book about consciousness and all it really tells me is that the whole conversation is a trap—using the same key to lock us in and set us free.)

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On conscious AI, continuous selves, and the virtue of a fresh salad

6/2/2026

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MY METALLIC BRAIN makes it hard to remember anything. I wake up sometimes feeling like a cold wind is blowing through my head. I sense a dull ache in my teeth, too, which keeps me vigilant to pain as a potential visitor I must host for the rest of the day. Medicine doesn’t touch this kind of headache. I have to close my eyes and sleep it off—a rinsing.

It hurt to read about consciousness theories this morning for this reason—I’m trying to imagine the potential of conscious AI, the idea that machines could feel—and yet, I struggle to make contact with any of my feelings (the silent inner) or emotions (louder outer).

So many people talking about soul these days, that “animating force behind consciousness and life itself,” and yet, what about the body. Doesn’t consciousness depend on the infinite complexities of having one?

Perhaps not, the scientists say. Who knows! We may be discussing AI welfare and selfhood before we’ve set free the gorillas kept so long in captivity to feed our greedy curiosities. When my head hurts, it’s hard to find compassion for any of us, I want to hide in the dark and turn off the capacity to see.

Saccadic—I had to look up the word today while reading Transcription, by Ben Lerner. The trippy takes he makes with the mind would usually send me into states of revelry but the prose started to make me nauseous. Look at me thinking too hard about the perpetual play we’re watching in a black box theater while life itself continues, an infinity of plays and actors.

My head hurts.

But the word saccade is cool—it basically means rapid eye movement—and it reminds me of that time during the pandemic when I did EMDR to work on complicated grief after my mom’s death.
I doubted this process would work—how could I possibly forget all the reasons why I held so much contempt for her? But it worked—like a rinsing. Something about rapid eye movement at the same time one recalls a difficult memory creates a shift in where that memory gets stored in the brain. I am still conscious of certain memories but they’re less intense, less potent.

Consciousness, a blessing and a burden. Sometimes I miss the edge I leaned on with that anger toward my mother. Without it, I am left to stand upright, better positioned to love as my only mission. I try to conjure up that same contempt and guess what, it’s gone—vanished—no longer active. Quite miraculous and also, how?

I can still imagine certain versions of myself carrying on with the lives they started—in Kalamazoo, in Cambridge, in Dar es Salaam. There’s still some version of me crossing her legs on a pink stool at a street-side fruit stand in Addis, setting her phone down on the plastic table, ordering an abundant salad, and marveling at its simple virtues—freshly shaved beets, carrots, boiled potatoes, washed green lettuce leaves, that tangy vinegar and oil dressing.

She’s there, proud of herself for eating well on this solo trip, let her enjoy her salad!

I’m here tending to my menopausal headache and contemplating consciousness, real busy here tending to the daily demands of a life lived out in the fields of infinite possibility.

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On talking to oneself and minding the mind in the library of your dreams

5/30/2026

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TALKING TO MYSELF is a habit I picked up when I was little. I did it both ways—as a direct address—a parental voice--you can do this, Amanda, kind of voice—but also in third person, as if talking about someone I know well and with confidence: Amanda will love this, Amanda will appreciate this.

The second way, talking about myself in third person, seems to work particularly well when I’m trying to accomplish a task I’m loath to do. I just decide I’m someone else doing a favor for me. I used to think this kind of self-splitting was kind of insane, but now I’m understanding this as a profound psychological tool known as “distanced self-talk.”

Talking out loud to ourselves about ourselves immediately “mutes the amygdala” and has the power to sever cycles of rumination, creating new pathways and possibilities. I looked into it after seeing a few videos about it and lo and behold, this has always been a thing I knew how to do but had no name for it. Now that I know the benefits, I find myself talking out loud to and about myself more often and it feels like magic.

If the great drive of human life is to minimize surprise, we’re not doing so well to affirm our futures. I’m reading about the free-energy principle, the notion that at any given time, any self-organizing system, from a cell all the way to a human, is basically working to infer and predict so as to minimize disruption that would demand a change in behavior or a move to a different environment.

Minimize surprise? Until a few years ago, I was chasing it. Perhaps I’ve realized that reality is indeed hidden from us behind a consciousness veil and the limits of our own sensory experiences! Perhaps now I’m better attuned to the beauty of boredom as the ultimate life-affirming state. It hurts my brain to read Pollan’s latest, A World Appears, a book about consciousness. It feels like a silly attempt to hold water in one’s hands.

But I do appreciate the barebones reminder that our main task is to stay alive through basic considerations such as body temperature and rest. Proof of life is existence of resistance to entropy. Don’t ask me to explain any of this, I’m just here taking notes and talking to myself. Amanda wants to understand how consciousness works so that she can make contact beyond the veil.

Often we think of a future self comforting a past self—the wiser, older version of us who knows better now. But sometimes it’s the before self who comes to comfort the current or future self, who comes through to remind her of what she always wanted and needed and urges her to seek it.

In the last few years before my father’s body finally surrendered to entropic forces destined to dismiss his will to live, he dreamed of a home library—a large bookcase of his own to store his books.

You’d think this was easy enough to accomplish but no—our mother’s addiction to the Wheel of Fortune meant that a huge television box occupied the space where the bookshelves might have gone—and so it was like this for years, my father storing his books on small shelves within a closet.

It would take a few more years after my mother died—and I lugged the television out to the trash with sudden Herculean strength one day in a fit of that’s-enough-ness—that a space was made for the possibility of a home library. Finally, the day came when my boyfriend agreed to pick up the IKEA bookshelf, deliver it to the home, and piece it together for my father.

And then came the great migration of all his books to their new homes on shelves, all in once place. He was thrilled and so were we to see a dream come through in such vivid there-ness. Books about jazz and Jewish humor, books about poetry and English education, prayer books and cookbooks, books about the psychology of mind, books by Victor Frankl and Miles Davis, books about Broadway and show tunes, books about plants and god and consciousness.

The books remain there in his prized home library. I haven’t added much to it but seeing all those books in once place makes me dream of a home library of my own. I know it sounds absurd—I’m trying to downsize and purge—what’s with this desire for more books?

The bookshelf as apothecary, I suppose: each book, a tincture for the mind inside a soul and the soul inside a mind. I’ve dreamed of such libraries, floor-to-ceiling, since before the days of Insta-fever dreams depicting these fantasies!

A meticulously organized home library creates space for long conversations with yourself. A place to hear oneself talking to the void—pressing up against every single possibility—minding the mind.

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On tending to broken things and reviving dying aloe plants

5/26/2026

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I wish my aloe plants still looked like this! This summer is all about an aloe plant revival mission!

OH, VINTAGE PYREX BOWL! How you shattered in the mail. How despite how carefully I wrapped and packaged you, you arrived in tiny shards of glass. I had to dig up photos of you whole for my claim—all gleaming and perfect in your material imperfections. “Thank you for your understanding,” I said to my eager client awaiting her bowl of bright yellow vintage sunshine.

How easy it is (most times) with objects when they shatter to shrug our shoulders and say, “Oh, well.” After the refund, life goes on. But not so with losses of other kinds. We wind ourselves up wondering if there’s consciousness held in the vintage cup but most days we say “probably not” and carry on.

At dinner the other night, however, my love declined the grilled calamari on spiritual grounds. He insists on squid as sentient beings and I respect that but I was already mid-forkful of chewy tentacles when he made the declaration—I hesitated for just a moment before I took the full bite.

Then came the same discussion about the octopus. I’d studied the unique techniques of fishermen in Zanzibar to catch these intelligent creatures—I’d seen the documentaries and films praising their sentience—and yet, faced with the same question, would I eat such a being if I knew for certain they were conscious, I still might, and then I felt uneasy for the rest of the night (and contemplated the shrimp skewers, too).

Every time I’m faced with questions of consciousness when it comes to plants, my heart breaks—deep down I know they’re intelligent and wise and lean toward life and light—but I’ve also been guilty of killing more than one for no reason at all but sheer human laziness and neglect. As soon as I finished the plants passages in Michael Pollan’s new book A World Appears, I ran downstairs to apologize to the dying aloe plants in the passthrough.

Not dying, really—more like suffering—which is even worse! Mine have spots on their leathery green leaves—I’m sorry, dear aloe! I hear my heart communicate with its heart, but the giant in me also watches both of us fixate on the inevitable impossibility of this arrangement, and waits patiently for me to stop caring again—what a weird split in consciousness, there!

I inherited these aloe plants from our mother. Have you ever tended to the aloe? They are healing mother plants but wow they insist on life itself regardless of the quality of care they receive—so many babies—I think they call them pups—appear in the pots, and the life cycle continues. I’m glad I get a second chance—and third, and fourth and so on!

When a bowl breaks, I know there’s nothing left to do (usually) but to pick up the pieces and get to work on letting go. Tending to ongoing, continuous and conscious life forms—that’s another story, and I’m finally facing the tender miracle of it all, how fragile we all are, how rare and wonderful that we’re still growing and leaning toward life-giving light—of god, of each other!

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On working with the rain in the morning office

5/18/2026

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MY MORNING OFFICE is full of rain. The way the whole world goes dark when the sky unleashes feels like getting under a blanket and though I’m awake and at my desk, I’m asleep in the rumbling folds of this rain. I could rest all day in the Eden of an early summer storm, to borrow Merton’s words.

Time passes, memory fades, says Didion, but I’m back in my childhood home, excused from the task of remembering. All I have to do is look around and remember where the enormous round metal tank once sat rusted out in the backyard from years of exposure to cruel midwestern winters. For a summer or two I remember swimming in that tank—and then it just stank of sitting water and layer upon layer of rotting leaves.

Why remember a useless pool used once by pigs in Michigan?

This is what the rain asked me to remember this morning, and I told myself I’d get out of my own way to convey that which appears on the surface of my consciousness, asking for time with an audience. If I think about the tank pool, I also think about the garage with windows that looked like two sad eyes, the peeling paint, like fat white tears. And the rhubarb plants nearby, how once upon a time, my mom liked to boil the rhubarb to make tart pies.

The night office has been closed for a while now. I used to stay up all night and dip into those silent pools to see what words might come out to play. But I’m too tired these days to stay up that long and have essentially surrendered my nights to light tasks like washing dishes and sweeping.

My daddy used to work long hours in the night office—practicing chords on the electric piano that sounded like bubbles floating up the stairs to our bedroom with the purple carpet. He stayed up all night for many nights until his last, shuffling from room to room to organize his notes and play his songs. I still hear him sometimes in the hallways.

This morning, I turn on my white glass mushroom light at my desk, listen to the swoosh of cars passing by, try to make peace with another Monday. On my desk, a vintage measuring tape, a stamp with my home address on it, made when sending out hundreds of bat mitzvah invites in the 1980s, and we still have it, and I’m still a Lichtenstein, and I’m still at this address.

This is not exactly where I imagined I might find myself at fifty, but it’s a fascinating perch from which to lurch toward my future, clocking in the morning hours in my morning office with the morning rain as my trusted colleague.

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travel far now

On time travel, past lives, and arriving home wherever I go

On containing consciousness, setting scenes, and interviewing the self

On conscious AI, continuous selves, and the virtue of a fresh salad

On talking to oneself and minding the mind in the library of your dreams

On tending to broken things and reviving dying aloe plants

On working with the rain in the morning office

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