I have a superpower. It’s a biggie: bigger than flight, bigger than invisibility, bigger even than the power to call thunderbolts down from the sky. It’s the biggest superpower of them all: the power to stop time. And I’m going to tell you how to do it.

You have to go to the desert.

Find a place where the sands are level for miles around.

Let the endless uniformity of the horizon wrap around you like a headband.

And sink down.

I don’t remember when I discovered this trick, because once you’ve stopped time, you forget how it was supposed to run in the first place. Last week, last year, twenty years ago: it’s all the same. Desert for miles around.

I do remember that people came to visit. Sometimes they trudged through miles of sand to see me, like a monument of ages past, and in my deathless glory I would rasp a sardonic, Ozymandian reversal:

“Look on my despair, ye mighty!”

And they would grow tired out here in the desert, and they would leave, and I would be at peace. Until spring came.

April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. (T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland)

There is a seed inside the soul of every incarcerated person, no matter how institutionalised, that wishes to be free. It vibrates with a terrible eagerness at the beginning of spring, and we fear its mutinous energy. For wanting to be happy, we call it a traitor; for wanting to dive once more, willingly, into the riptide of time, we call it mad. But it knows what we’ve chosen to forget.

You can’t stop time.

You can step out of it for a while; you can refuse to engage with it; you can go to a place where all signs of its passing are invisible to you. But it goes on nonetheless. And out here in the desert, though there are no rivers and no raindrops to breed lilacs out of the dead land, there is still enough moisture in the air for the seed inside you to cry out, and for the sepulchre you have built – to your trauma, your grief, your past self – to rust.

We can be prone to identifying so strongly with a single part of ourselves that we imagine it is the basis for our entire personality. This is a common, understandable, and very dangerous mistake that confuses ‘wholeness’ with ‘singleness’, or ‘domination by the one’. Doing so ‘devalues the primal multiplicity of souls’ (James Hillman, ‘A Blue Fire’ p.40), and deskills us: when we are asked to step for a single moment outside of this false centre, we find ourselves bereft of landmarks: lost in the desert.

I thought I was paying respect to my pain when I came out here. I was giving it the acknowledgement that no one else had. But in making it the centre of my being, I made it a monument inside which every other part of me was bricked up and suffocated.

And I still cling to it. I cling to it because it is like a child who was once abandoned, and it screams terribly if I turn away for a second, because it is convinced it will be forgotten again, and left alone forever.

How do we pay tribute to our trauma without stopping time?

How do we recognise and validate our pain without it overwhelming us?

The answer lies somewhere in the song of the seed.

The seed has no centre. It is a singularity filled with potential: millions of selves in endless constellations. This multiplicity can feel overwhelming, even threatening, but there is a place for our pain in there too: a garden, yet ungrown, where silence reigns and holy waters circumambulate forever.

Not a desert where we might wander, lost, but a temenos: a sacred space where we can step outside of time for a moment and converse with ourselves in peace. No sepulchre resides there, but a fragment of living soul that has finally found a place of safety; a place of love.

A place for pain.