How to Be a Swimmer in the Stream of Time: Poet, Painter, and Philosopher Etel Adnan on the Antidote to Disorientation and Isolation

“The definition of the soul is made of these places where you feel that the world came into being so that they could exist.”

To take the vaster perspective of time and space is always an act of resistance to seeing the present as islanded in time — the depiction menacing us from TV screens and news headlines. But it is also a deeply disorienting experience, for it plunges us into the immensity of being, asking us to learn to swim in the stream of time — or else we sink into our isolated smallne...