This is the second installment of the blog series of poems by my colleague and friend Judy Brown, who is the poet laureate for this site. Her work is available through her website, www.judysorumbrown.com/.

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Judy will write about the context in which she wrote each poem and what it means to her, and I will conclude with my reflections about the archetypes expressed in it.

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Time Travel

Time travel

Just requires imagination

And a form of love, longing—

Catching up again

With those we’ve lost,

Launching all of us

Into a circle in the future—

“You should meet,” we say,

Introducing one another,

Threaded together

By bonds and links

They cannot see,

But I can feel—as foundational

As earth itself.

  -Judy Brown, These Days

A friend and I were planning to gather friends who didn’t know each other for an afternoon on my deck. I was puzzling about what to say on the invitation. His response: “Just say you should meet!” I did. The invitation said, “Come for an afternoon because you should meet.”  It was a wonderful gathering.

Later I was thinking of people I love, no longer among the living, and how it would be wonderful to gather them as well—they, too, should know each other. Wherever they are in eternity. Just get together and chat. Then I realized I’d love to have them mingle with my current pals as well. A meeting of my treasured folks, gathering across time, across space, across generations, all webbed together because their links would make it natural, fun—as natural and fun as the idea is in my mind.

Carol’s Archetypal Thoughts:  Wow, such an innovative Lover poem! Love does seem to transcend time. This poem causes me to reflect on how as infants we needed someone to care for us to survive, who would necessarily be our first loves. Then later as children, during times in which we just soaked up their examples, our mirror neurons encouraged us to emulate whatever they did, becoming like them—however much we rebelled and however much we worked finding ourselves. Yes, psychologists focus on what we pick up from our early home life that was unfortunate or worse, to free us from these. Yet I have noticed that friends who experienced trauma in families also inhaled positive qualities from their family that contributed to their success. In later life, when grieving the death of a life partner, many feel that a part of them is missing—and it is. That is, the habits and bodily engagement with them seem gone unless memories remind us that we still have those capacities.

Imagining a time travel meeting can remind us that most of us embody qualities that originally came from others and that others can experience through us. My brother and I recently shared memories about our mom and dad. Implicit in that was our mutual desire to carry forward what we most admired about them in our own behaviors as a legacy to those we influence. I look forward to telling him we were having a time travel meeting. I bet he will greet the news with a look dad used to get that mixed skepticism with fondness.

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