Chronos + Kairos

Asian Diaspora Jam 2025

I just lived living into a dream.

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My teammates and I just hosted the 5th Asian Diaspora Jam, bringing together 30 of us at the Ben Lomond Quaker Center near Santa Cruz, CA from April 1st to the 6th.

We opened our gathering on the Tuesday afternoon in the Redwood Circle - blessed by the sprinkle of spring rain and displeased by the wet-cold.

It wasn’t long before we decided we received enough blessings, briskly walking up the winding trail to the Casa de Luz, a cozy rounded shelter with wide windows overlooking the hills, under the watchful care of the surrounding redwoods.

We settled into our circle, a gentle buzz of anticipation in the air. Our team of six were each responsible for sharing opening details to support us with some structure and agreements in co-creating the next five days together.

One of those details was about time culture:

• During the Jam, we will be dancing with ancient Greek concepts of time, chronos and kairos.

  • Chronos:

    • Greek word for chronological time

    • quantitative

    • sequential and objective

    • measured by the clock, calendar, sun in the sky, and other tools.

  • Kairos

    • Greek word for nonlinear time

    • qualitative

    • dynamic and subjective

    • incalculable and numinous

• We honor the precious time we’ve each made for ourselves to be here, especially during these uncertain and troubling times. So, we honor our sessions as a whole group by showing up on time and ending on time. When we honor the chronos, we drop into kairos much more readily.

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By Wednesday afternoon, the 24 hours together had stretched and folded on itself. It felt more like 24 hours lived into for each of the 30 participants - 720 kairos hours piled high within a 24 chronos hours window.

This quality of time-bending continued throughout the Jam. We somehow created space for the depth and breadth of gifts, curiosities, dissonance, and multitude of experiences concurring. In the Jam we acknowledge 31 Jam experiences - each of the 30 participants’ unique Jam and the collective Jam.

We often time traveled to the past and future while anchored into the present. We connected to our benevolent ancestors and descendants, we grieved what was and visioned forward into what could be, and we dropped into an amorphous time and space spellbound by sonic soundscape and intuitive dance.

As we gathered for our final circle on Sunday morning, our first day together felt lifetimes away and simultaneously as if it happened in the blink of an eye.

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I experience my dreams in the way that I experience groups spaces like the Jam. The hours I sleep may be measured in chronos, yet my dreams are experienced in kairos.

When I honor my body’s need for a healthy chronos amount of sleep, and arise the next day with a conscious tending to the transition of dreamy-kairos to wakeful-chronos, I am able to remember my dreams better. Whether it’s vivid and palpable or all I can sense is a distant echo of a vague feeling, I can connect to whatever remnants of my dreams with greater success.

Where I go to in my dreams is a concurrence of timebending and shapeshifting - past, present, and future happening all at once in familiar and strange places casted with characters ordinary, unusual, or completely mystifying.

And when a dream is shared in Community Dreamwork, the dream appears to live into the number of people in the group, tapping into the kairos, as we offer our questions and insights inspired by the multitude of timelines and memories we each show up with.

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When I Jam, I get to live into my vision of living in a world that makes space for the “not-normal” and fantasies of beloved community.

When I dream, I get to rehabilitate my imaginal capacity to nurture the “not-normal” and fantasies of beloved community.

In Jams and in dreams, I become conscious of chronos and the kairos contained within each other and how they are of each other, much like Jams and dreams are contained in each other and are of each other.

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