One of my favorite metaphors, though it is more than just a metaphor, is to look space/time as a spider web. It’s a useful non-linear device for conceptualizing space/time as a web. The strands become time lines and where two or more strands meet you have spatial nodes which represent events that the strands of time intersect with. It can be a useful tool for helping you wrap your mind around the non-linear aspects of time and I’ve found it particularly helpful in relationship to identity work, because you can move from one event identity to another using the strands of time to bring you to that event.
Nonetheless this is only one paradigm I use for space/time magic. There are other ones which can be just as helpful, especially if you consider that time moves in many different directions. The linear perception of time is a straight line: Past, present, and future. You can actually work with that straight line, but treat it as something that you can resequence by adding new events and possibilities into that line or changing existing ones (at least in your memory), which then opens up new possibilities that may not have been accessible otherwise.
One of my favorite approaches to space/time magic work is one where you step across the timelines until you find the reality you want to manifest. This may seem impossible, but if you consider that you actually have access to multiple times at any given moment of your life and that such time lines are defined by your choices, then what can be understood is that at any given moment, depending on the choices you make, you can either continue to stay in the timeline you are in, or step across to another one.
It may not seem like it, but in the moment you are exchanging one reality for another, leaving behind one choice, one potential path that you knew, and stepping into another path that you didn’t even know existed and yet was there because of the choices you made. Most of the timelines are similar, but it all depends on the choice you make. If you make a radically different choice from the life you know, you can step away from the reality you knew to something completely different, but that process will involve some free fall and limbo because you are stepping into the unknown. I vividly experienced this for most of this year when I chose to get divorced.
I stepped away from a life I knew and for a time I was in limbo, not knowing exactly where I would end up. I had a place to stay and the means to take care of myself, but I very much had to embrace the unknown and accept that it could and would take some time to fully land. It also helped that I eventually did some space/time magic which involved fully opening myself to the possibilities I had access to at the time, but the most important lesson that working provided me wasn’t to settle for just any reality, but keep myself open to the possibility of a better reality coming along. Eventually this did happened and I chose to move to a new city and start my life over. Since then, in this new place, I’ve been continuing to step from one reality to another, because even when you root yourself there are still multiple timelines you can access. Reality is never what it seems. When you pull back the curtain, you discover that what you thought was so real, was just an illusion and that you had more possibilities available to you then you would have otherwise recognized.
