Publishing MOLD for the past twelve years has taught me many lessons but perhaps the most important one in this moment of personal and planetary transition is untangling myself from capitalist notions of time. I’ve adopted a personal mantra of being “on tree time.” It is a skein that weaves together two threads: the myriad rhythms that orient perceptions of time and the recognition that many environmental and community conditions have to align for ideas to take root. It is also a way of reminding myself that although I might not taste the fruit of the proverbial and physical trees I hope to plant, planting those seeds and nurturing them in this lifetime is still some of the most potent and transformational work that I can do.

Although our ancestors have been marking time and keeping calendars for millenia, clock-bound time—collectively measured in seconds, minutes, and hours—is a construct that has roots in control and the Roman Catholic church, “That the Roman Catholic Church should have played a major role in the invention and development of clock technology is not surprising: the strict observance of prayer times by monastic orders occasioned the need for a more reliable instrument of time measurement,” writes William J. H. Andrewes, an expert on timekeeping, for Scientific American. “Further, the Church not only controlled education but also possessed the wherewithal to employ the most skillful craftsmen.” With the expansion of railroads, “astronomical observatories began to distribute the precise time to the railroad companies by telegraph,” and by 1851, the first public time service was introduced using clock beats from the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The story of clock-bound time is one of aligning people to a schedule that prioritizes those with money, power, and a devotion to commerce and capitalism. 

Agustina Woodgate’s National Times. Whitney Biennial 2019.

In 2019 I walked into a room of clocks neatly lined up on the gallery wall. Agustina Woodgate’s installation, National Times, for the 2019 Whitney Biennial is deceptively simple but speaks to the “master-slave” configuration, a system of control that keeps us all in sync. As curator Rujeko Hockley shared in TIME magazine, “The idea is that all the slave clocks take their time from the master clock, which is itself synced to the atomic clock, so that all of these remain the same. But of course, over time they fall out of sync.” This artwork felt so important to me in that moment because I was awaiting the birth of my first child and navigating the fear of what it meant to work for myself and be a “good” parent. What might it mean to let time slip, to step outside of institutional notions of time—and capitalist notions of productivity—and break free of a master-slave configuration?

Shipping Issue 4 out with my 3-week-old strapped to my body.

My only model for parenting came from my immigrant parents who worked for their same respective companies for nearly 40 years. A steady paycheck, health insurance, 401K, and structured time off seemed like the only path to successfully fulfill this new role. My entry into motherhood came with “sitting the month” 坐月子, a Chinese postpartum practice of rest, recovery and confinement. I shipped the fourth issue of MOLD with my weeks-old newborn strapped to my chest and my mother helping to stuff envelopes. It felt powerful and affirming to still be able to work after giving birth! I was desperate to prove that I was still the same person and that I could still do the same things. I resisted succumbing to the rhythms of my newborn. I tried to get him to cooperate with my schedule. These overtures failed. But with my second child, I really leaned into the grace of rest and let myself fall into her schedule. I realized that the freedom of working for myself meant that I could return to work when my body and my newborn felt ready. I still shipped MOLD’s issue on Seeds with her strapped to my body. This time, I didn’t feel the call of the clock to dictate my timing.

In the winter of 2025 I facilitated a weekly community visioning process at Rodeo, my favorite bar. We called it Sunday Seeds and it was an open invitation to the Field Meridians community to help us figure out how we might plant a food forest in our neighborhood in Crown Heights. Also known as forest gardens, food forests are biodiverse plantings of edible perennial plants designed to mimic natural forests. Food forests are known to improve air quality, urban biodiversity, shade equity and water retention. During the first meeting we set community agreements and laid the cornerstone for how we might work together. We move at the speed of trust.1 The meetings are a form of life in rehearsal.2 For years I have searched for a format that might foster a sense of community and collaboration. I had a hunch that if we could hold space for our global readership to interact, there would undoubtedly be some magic. But online platforms, listservs, and discussion boards didn’t feel like an answer. In many ways, Field Meridians was a response to this feeling of lack. But even in this new shape, I craved a consistent time and place to commune with people—to support, question, disagree, and build trust. Sunday Seeds, inspired by the structure of community board meetings and other grassroots organizing tactics, was an attempt to hold space for belonging.

I grew up in an evangelical Chinese Christian church in Houston. The intergenerational ties that bound me to my church community kept me out of a lot of trouble as a rebellious teenager. The aunties and uncles and grandmas and grandpas that fed me, watched me grow up, and provided a soft landing for my family in times of hardship instilled a strong sense of belonging in me. The brilliant organizer and movement strategist Maurice (Moe) Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, often speaks about cultivating this sense of belonging.3 Moe’s call to action galvanized my search to rekindle that feeling of knowing that no matter what happened in the world there was a place that I could return to, a group of people who have unconditional love for me, and a place to call home.

Sunday Seeds was not a church, but it was a place for some spiritual rest and safety. Each week was grounded in a reading chosen by a member and a short group discussion before we broke out into working groups to move forward on our proposal. Each week ended in an open invitation for community asks—a friend in search of housing, a collection for new migrants, an upcoming opportunity to serve the community. At one meeting in early January, a member expressed frustration around the urgency of the work, questioning whether it made more sense for us to use our energies to support the immediate needs of people in our neighborhood. It’s a tension that so many of us wrestle with—what role am I playing to create the world I want to live in? After much discussion, including a brilliant response from one of our elders, Rona, who gently reminded us that “we can do all the things, but not all at once,” I thought about what it means to plant a tree.

The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is now. The adage is a reminder that fruit-bearing trees can take 15-20 years to bear fruit. Many of us who participated in Sunday Seeds will have moved on to other geographies and interests by then. We are trusting that someone will nurture that tree for the duration of its rooting and strengthening. It can take a decade for a food forest to establish itself—filling in, establishing homes for many species, and finding balance for the myriad needs of a living, breathing, complex being. As of today, we don’t have land. We don’t have money. But I have a deep sense of certainty that we will plant the first trees for a food forest in Crown Heights. (We even have a few saplings in a greenhouse being tended to as we wait to find fertile ground.) To be on tree time allows us to trust in the unknowable, to recognize our interdependence, and to plant seeds of belonging in a moment that is nearly incomprehensible with the depth of its despair, destruction and violence.

My hope is that we can all find some grounding in being on tree time. To become more entangled at the roots gives us the strength to reach towards an open sky. I hope that we can learn from our tree elders to give and take freely from one another, fostering an interdependence and mutual flourishing. Transition gives us space to leave things behind. Transition reminds us that endings are invitations to begin again.