Reading the Earth
On Multiplicities of Time
Essay by nancy Smith
We tell time with many elemental things: sun, moon, stars, water, incense, sand, fire, flowers, metal, quartz, light, atoms. There is no singular way of telling time, nor does there need to be. They all offer us a different way of organizing and capturing our relationship to the world as we move through it. Likewise, there is no precise definition of time. It is often couched in what it does, rather than what it is. Time, it could be said, captures movement. Fundamentally, timekeeping devices relay repeated actions: tick, tock, drip, click.
Early clocks were as simple as a stick in the ground. The movement of the shadows captured by a stick (or what would later become a sundial) creates a visible progression of the day. Light and shadows come together to form a particular kind of meaning. Atomic clocks capture the invisible vibrations of atoms as we move through the universe. Both are precise in their own way, though precision offers a limited conception of what time could be. Whether visible or not, we are always moving, and time is a reminder of our constant orbit.
A heartbeat is our most personal measure of time, and the one that dictates how much time we have in this world. Heartbeats, like fingerprints, are unique and contain rhythms that are specific to the body they inhabit. Hearts, like our sense of time, speed and slow in relation to our surroundings, respond to emotions, and react to our embodied movements.
Time, most of all, imposes order on what can seem like an otherwise random, chaotic world. This is not to say that time is the same for everyone. Time for the farmer is not the same as time for the astronomer. Time for the poet is not the same as time for the physicist.
A clock is not time itself; it is a representation. Like other models we create to visualize data, clocks have simply gathered up information on how the world moves and put it into a form that adheres to our, now commonly used, 24-hour day.
Visual theorist Johanna Drucker writes, โThe visual order of the calendar seems like the very structure of time itself, so naturalized has it become through graphic conventions. Like lines on a map demarcating one state or nation from another, the division of one day from another is powerfully structured by graphic conventions. These diagrammatic schemes are performative. They make the world by structuring our experience of it.โ We are so used to looking at clocks, calendars, trackers, and other time-keeping devices that it makes time feel like the world itself, rather than an interpretation of it.
She further writes, โDiagrammatic images spatialize relations in a meaningful way. They make spatial relations meaningful. And they do so according to conventions about how we translate observation, sensation, perception of phenomena in knowable forms.โ Those conventions are deeply tied to Western science, capitalism, and colonial structures that have dominated the way timekeeping devices are designed and utilized. This has only increased as data visualization has influenced the way we understand the world.
Eschinardiโs water clock (reproduced from Francesco Eschinardi, Appendix Ad Exodium de Tympano) Silvio A. Bedini, The Compartimented Cylindrical Clepsydra, 1648.
One of the problems with trying to impose our own order on the world is that our understanding of the world is limited. Consider the abrupt switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. The Julian calendar, named for Julius Caesar, was used for many centuries; however, it was slightly misaligned with the solar year, and over time began to drift away from the seasons. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced the Gregorian calendar as a way to rectify the issues with the Julian calendar. Over time, countries around the world adopted this calendar, but it wasnโt until 1752 that the British Empire switched to the Gregorian calendar. In order to align with the new calendar, a discrepancy needed to be resolved, so they simply dropped eleven days. Thus, September 2, 1752 was followed the next day by September 14.
There is an arbitrariness to time, or perhaps not time itself, but to our various methods of capturing and representing it.
Many systems of counting, including the Western system, are based on powers of ten. The Ancient Mayans, however, used a base-20 system, which also informed their calendar design. They used an eighteen-month solar calendar with twenty days per month. The twenty named days are all associated with a different deity who governed each day. This created a 360-day year. Those extra five days are deemed a special time called Wayeb. This scared โtime out of timeโ has traditionally been used as a healing and cleansing period, a time to let go of the past and reconnect spiritually to the world. The Ancient Egyptians also had five extra days for festivities, though their calendar was twelve months and thirty days.
We are always making adjustments for these holes in time because missing seconds eventually turn into missing days.
The movements of the universe both create and conflict with our clocks and calendars. The leap year is a response to how we move through space. The rhythms of our ever-expanding solar system donโt align neatly with our various numerical groupings, whether in ten or twenty, twelve or twenty-four. Many cultures have historically missed the leap year, which is why so many ancient calendars drift away from the seasons. By the Western calendar, we fall about one day short every four years. There are more precise ways of measuring this. If you add one day every four years, skipping the thirty-third year, we get closer to capturing this missing time. After the Gregorian reform, the formula for calculating leap days became 97 leap days in 400 years.
To put that another way: each day is six hundred millionths of a second longer than the previous day. Which is to say, this is the longest day of your life.
Illustration of the inner workings of Chinese engineer Su Songโs 725 Astronomical Clock Tower, 1959, courtesy of the United States National Museum.
We all have a sense of embodied time and biological clocks that shape our need for things like sleep, food, and water. Our circadian rhythms pull us through the day and night, pushing us in and out of sleep, though these too have been affected not only by clocks but by urbanism and electricity, which light up our days (and nights) in ways that defy the sun and moon. For millennia, people slept in two shifts, waking in the middle of the night, often for hours at a time. This phenomenon of โtwo sleepsโ is widely documented across cultures throughout the Middle Ages and earlier. According to historian Roger Ekirch, there are numerous possible reasons for this biphasic sleep. People often slept together in the same bed; multigenerational families, and even traveling strangers, might be cuddled up for the night, which required a delicate balance of sharing the bed and not moving too much. This was easier to adhere to if you only slept for a few hours, then woke, and returned to bed later, rather than trying to stay still for a full night. It has also been suggested that it was simply additional time to get things done, as many folks returned to work during this time, taking care of household chores that hadnโt been finished during the day. This window of time between sleeps was commonly used for socializing, sex, and prayer. It wasnโt until the early nineteenth century that one sleep became common, perhaps not surprisingly due to the Industrial Revolution, and an increased reliance on clocks to orient with production schedules. Alarm clocks were invented in 1787 (incidentally, invented by a clock salesman who needed to get up early to sell clocks) and have forever been used to disrupt our natural wake times. Without clocks, without capitalism, one wonders if we might slip back into the rhythm of two sleeps.
To see the subtle shifts in time โ when roses bloom, when oak trees drop their leaves โ shows a world that is warming, a world whose rhythms are changing because of the climate crisis.
Phenology is the study of when things happen in nature: when trees bloom, when birds migrate, when seasons end. The Phenology Clock, a project led by artist Natalie Jeremijenko includes a series of timekeeping objects that capture seasonal time. These clocks, which were designed in both physical and digital form, collected place-based observational data contributed by thousands of people to highlight the shift in natural phenomena over a decade. Designed with a circular shape โ the form of most contemporary clocks and watches โ and stripes of different colors to represent different seasonal activities, the clock wasnโt exactly a time-keeping device, but more of a record of natural data. To see the subtle shifts in time โ when roses bloom, when oak trees drop their leaves โ shows a world that is warming, a world whose rhythms are changing because of the climate crisis.
Bears in Colorado, for example, are starting to emerge from hibernation too early. Itโs warm enough for them to wake up, but there isnโt enough food, so they have to venture further down the mountain, which leads to more humanโbear conflicts. Depending on the region, bears can hibernate for two or three months, or up to seven months in the coldest areas. They arenโt necessarily asleep for all of this time, but they go into a state of torpor where they donโt eat or drink. Instead, their body temperature drops, and they live off their fat stores.
Cats sleep for about eighteen hours a day. Giraffes sleep for only about five hours a day, though they can go weeks without actually sleeping, only standing or lying down for short stretches of time for a nap. Dolphins sleep unihemispherically, which means half of their brain is awake and on the lookout, while the other half is asleep, and like us, they typically snooze for about eight hours a day. Sea otters sleep for about half a day, and often link hands during sleep, or ingeniously use seaweed to tie themselves to a friend so as not to float away.
Bees keep a 24-hour biological clock. In 1929, Ingebord Beling, a German ethologist, trained bees to come to a feeding station, adding sugar water at specific times. The bees quickly learned the schedule and adapted when she changed it. They were even able to anticipate the timing of the sugar water, often showing up slightly before it was feeding time. Based on her research, she coined the term time-memory, which is something many animals, including humans, possess.
In the 1950โs Max Renner conducted another experiment to test beesโ time-memory. He trained bees in Paris to find sugar water in a dish at 8:15pm. After the bees had learned this routine, he took them one evening after feeding, and carefully shuttled them on a plane to New York City, where he replicated the space and set out a dish of sugar water to see when they would appear. Despite the five-hour difference between cities, the bees emerged in search of food exactly twenty-four hours later, at 3:15pm Eastern time.
It makes sense that bees would have a highly attuned sense of time since they eat from plants that open and close in relation to daylight. Whatโs more, bees use the sun as a navigation device and are able to provide precise directions to other bees about the distance and location of nectar, which requires a deep connection to time.
Star map of the south polar projection for Su Songโs celestial globe, Xin Yi Xiang Fa Yao, 1092.
Even before the Industrial Revolution, there were many clocks that helped us to tell time in the dark; to capture the time beyond light, clocks that use water, flame, scent, or sand were designed so that we could tell time on a cloudy day or at night.
The fenjaan clock is a Persian water clock that relies on a small metal bowl with a tiny hole in it, which floats on the top of a container of water and then slowly fills until it drops to the bottom. Like an hourglass where material flows, this kind of design has been used by the Babylonians, Ancient Egyptians, and some Native American peoples. In Ancient Persia, the fenjaan was used to regulate water for farmers, ensuring that each farm received an equal amount of water.
Incense clocks, historically used in China and throughout East Asia, can work in various ways. Incense burns at a consistent rate, so simply watching the stick burn down works as a timer. Sometimes these clocks were attached to a gong or another mechanism for creating a sound at regular intervals. Perhaps more interestingly, some incense clocks are based on smell itself. A series of different incense sticks can be aligned to burn in a specific order, and the smell changes depending on the specific time of day. According to this clock, we might have lunch at the rose hour and dinner at the lavender hour.
Smell is also one of the ways dogs tell time. They can smell how long you have been gone as your scent wanes throughout the day. This is why, if you keep a regular schedule, they have a sense of when you will come home.
One of the most longstanding, Earthly timekeeping devices is the Newgrange monument in Irelandโs Boyne Valley. Newgrange was built by a farming community that inhabited the lush region over 5,000 years ago, making it even older than the pyramids at Giza. It is a large, round mound (279 ft. wide and 43 ft. high) atop a hill, with a long (62 ft.) passageway that leads to the interior, which is thought to have served as a tomb or temple. What makes Newgrange special is that the passageway is perfectly aligned toward the sun, allowing light to enter only at certain times. Only once per year, precisely on the morning of the winter solstice, sunlight hits the back wall of the tomb. During the days around the solstice, light creeps into this space gradually, until it hits the back wall every year, once per year.
Unlike many other societies of the time, the builders at Newgrange were apparently aware of the problems of drift and accounted for the leap year. There are 97 keystones around Newgrange, which correspond to the most accurate accounting of 97 leap days that occur over 4oo years.
Newgrange, like the phenology clock, feels deeply connected to seasonal time. Because it was created and used by a farming community, a connection to, and reverence for, the land can be felt in the design of this monument. It feels almost oppositional to the current moment, where there is an obsession with โpreciseโ time, inherited from the Industrial Revolution, as it relates to efficiency and productivity. Time cards, factory manufacturing, and more recently, cell phones (which double as clocks), activity trackers, and so-called smart watches alert us with constant notifications, keeping track of our every move. We are expected to be always attuned to every moment, but do these devices actually attune us to anything in the world, or simply to the devices themselves and the way they structure our time?
Digital clocks have become a dominant form because of their practical use value and the prevalence of digital technologies, but they are not beautiful in the way a watch face can be. (Though it is possible to set your phone to a clock face.) Digital clocks capture only a very specific moment in time. They do not give you a sense of time. On a watch face with hands, you can see the whole span of the day as you check the time. There is a sense that time is moving because the hands are circulating around in their little orbit. To watch it click ahead is a reminder of the physicality of time, which includes the bodies we live in, which are beholden to this ticking away. This, too, feels evident in a sundial, a water clock, or an incense clock, where the movement of time becomes something physical to observe.
To watch it click ahead is a reminder of the physicality of time, which includes the bodies we live in, which are beholden to this ticking away.
Atomic clocks are considered to be precise because they donโt drift in the way mechanisms, such as a pendulum or a quartz crystal, do. Over time, most mechanical clocks will become slightly fast or slow, needing adjustment over the years. Atoms, though, cannot drift because they are moving with the universe. Each kind of atom absorbs and emits light at specific frequencies. Tuning into these atomic frequencies โ typically these clocks use cesium โ tunes us into the most constant, stable beat in the universe. It is often said that atomic clocks are billions of times more accurate than any other clocks that exist. Numerous systems rely on them for accuracy, such as GPS, data networks, financial markets, power grids, and communications systems.
Somehow, the precision of Newgrange is all the more impressive when considering it was created without the use of digital technology, machines, telescopes, or other tools we have today. In fact, the atomic clock, which was created in 1949, was only about as accurate as other mechanical clocks of the day. It was through the development of technologies that we were able to use light waves more and more accurately to tap into the resonance of atoms. The creators of Newgrange didnโt have these kinds of tools. They must have spent generations watching, observing, and noting the rhythms of the solar system. Like those who tracked their local environments and contributed data to the phenology clock, there is a slowness to Newgrange that requires us to pay attention in a way that seems to rarely happen in most contemporary contexts.
There are clocks that attempt to capture a sense of deep time. Deep time refers to time on a scale that we have trouble comprehending: the billions of years of geologic time that stretch back to the start of our universe. The Clock of the Long Now, for example, is designed to keep time for 10,000 years. Built into the side of a mountain in Texas, and funded by Jeff Bezos, this mechanical clock aims to actually tick for 10,000 years. Stewart Brand, one of the founding board members of the Long Now Foundation, has said that, โSuch a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well-engineered, would embody deep time for people.โ
There is an irony, even a misstep, in the attempt to build a human-centered device to capture a sense of deep time โ humans have not been around for 99.99% of the Earthโs existence. The hubris speaks to the desire of billionaires to impose their own order on the Earth, not an enduring symbol of geologic time. Rather than designing something that works with the Earth, they are trying to build something that relies on human-made structures and conceptions of time. A true deep time clock would be ecological by design. Why not build a 10,000-year clock using bees? Or dirt? Or sun? Or air? Something that already provides the basis for deep time? Itโs highly unlikely humans will be here in 10,000 years, so who exactly are we building this mechanical clock for? Aliens would more readily understand a clock that connected to the natural elements of the Earth, rather than human mechanical technology. Besides, hasnโt nature already given us a deep time clock? The Earth itself is telling time in a billion different ways if we simply spend time in it.
Each ring on a tree marks one year. Other creatures develop lines like this; mollusks and clam shells have lines that correspond to the tides. We even have microscopic lines on our teeth that record the days of our lives.
The Ribbon Tree in Idaho City, Idaho. Photo by Nancy Smith, 2025.
What living thing (besides the planet itself) has lasted 10,000 years? The longest living organism in the world, currently on record, is a hexactinellid sponge, thought to be at least 15,000 years old. Sometimes called glass sponges, they are beautiful creatures who live in the deep sea. Cylindrical, white, and ethereal, they look like fine pieces of lace woven into careful geometric patterns. In fact, they offer a shape that has inspired biomimicry in engineering and design contexts, including the cross-hatched structure of the Eiffel Tower. Could a hexactinellid sponge offer us a more elegant path to a deep-time clock? At any rate, it might return us closer to the Earth, whose time we are trying to express.
In his essay, โTime as Kinship,โ Indigenous philosopher Kyle Whyte explores the idea of kinship time as it relates to climate change. He argues that climate change is typically presented in a linear way. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, which guide climate policy, consistently point to specific points of warming related to specific points in time (e.g. if we donโt reduce carbon emissions by X% in the next ten years, temperatures will rise by Yห). This is typically how climate data is presented: climate events, over time, projected into an incremental future based on the past. Climate change, in other words, is presented to us as a ticking clock. Itโs not that this data is wrong, per se, only that the way we organize it in uniform linear units generates a sense of imperilment and urgency. Whyte argues that thinking about climate in a linear way limits how we can create meaningful change and pushes us toward upholding the colonial status quo, rather than imagining more radically sustainable ways of engaging with the environment. He writes, โSince time is running out and thereโs seemingly little time to respond, taken-for-granted strategies get employed to protect the taken-for-granted state of affairs from disruption.โ
Kinship time, on the other hand, offers us a relational way of thinking about how we can respond to the climate crisis in a more communal and responsible way. Kinship, which does not mean biological kin, is about relationships of shared responsibility within a society that generate an ethic that requires people to come together to support one anotherโs safety, well-being, and self-determination. If we are to frame climate change and its unfolding in kinship time, we can focus on complex social relations and our obligations to others, rather than simply adhering to a set of established expectations about โproblem solving.โ Whyte writes, โWhen time is experienced through kinship, the ticking clock goes away. Duration is perceived according to the degree of current kinship relationships, the history of kinship relationships, and future possibilities of kinship relationships.โ If we shift our perspective of time, we can shift our approach to the climate crisis, ensuring that we donโt implement changes that simply continue modes of extraction and exploitation that created the crisis.
Kinship time can also account for multispecies relationships in a way that linear time resists. Samantha Chisholm Hatfield, in writing about Traditional Ecological Knowledge, highlights that โtribal understandings of time are defined by cues and patterns observed in the natural world. As such, time is then relied on, operated in, and based on a 3D construction rather than the Westernized linear time system.โ
The oldest creatures on record, the Bolosoma Stalked Glass Sponge, can live up to 15,000 years. Image courtesy of National Marine Sanctuaries, NOAA.
The phenology clock, too, tracks the natural phenomena and cycles of the Earth. It is a design that attempts to capture that connection to and observation of nature in a navigable data collection. However, in looking at the phenology clock, we are still a step removed from looking at the actual world. Watching the tides and the shifts in sand and rock as the water comes and goes is a vastly different experience from simply reading a tide clock.
One clock that might reconcile different notions of time is a garden clock, a living representation of time. Carl Linnaeusโs Floral Clock, a mostly theoretical idea dreamed up by the well-known biologist, would rely on the natural rhythms of plants to tell time. Within a garden, it is thought, one could plant a range of species that respond to the light and dark. Many flowers open and close at specific times; Moonflowers and Jasmine open up in the dark and close during the day, while Morning Glory opens up at sunrise. A garden clock suggests a deep relationality between species that would require a careful sense of collaboration and care to maintain. Itโs a beautiful thing to imagine; however, the whole world is already a clock. Flowers are but one lifeform that is telling us something about how we spin through space. There are countless other species that express a sense of time, and the environment is a reminder that there is no single way to tell time.
What does this array of clocks tell us? One interpretation is that we are obsessed with time, but perhaps a more generous reading is that we are trying to make sense of our world, and that doesnโt happen in a singular way. We define time over and over again because it doesnโt mean just one thing. Anthropologist Tim Ingold writes, โEnvironments are constituted in life, not just in thought, and it is only because we live in an environment that we can think at all.โ As we navigate an ever-increasingly chaotic world, it makes sense that we would lean into time as a way of ordering our environment, but we donโt need a clock to tell us what time it is; the Earth is always already telling us.
See also
SEE ALSO: Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production and Visualization and Interpretation: Humanistic Approaches to Display by Johanna Drucker โข At Dayโs Close: Night in Times Past by Roger Ekirch โข The Time Nature Keeps: A Visual Guide to the Cycles and Time Spans of the Natural World by Helen Pilcher.
Author Bio
Nancy Smith is a writer and artist in Brooklyn. She is currently working on a climate fiction novel and a collection of essays. Her work has been published in McSweeneyโs, The Rumpus, Santa Fe Writers Project, Your Impossible Voice, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco. somequietfuture.com
