If you imagine a tree with three leaves… you can imagine that the tree has three unique, ‘fast speed’ (leaves die off) ways of being in the world. They are unique physical ‘positions’ from which the tree and reality come together.

You could think of them as three unique domains of temporality. Three (+) temporal dimensions (and the betweens of them). Because each leaf will experience all phenomenon uniquely, even though they belong to a unity.

The nature of the tree’s relationship to time includes the ‘three-fold’ temporality aspects of each leaf, but it is at once a union of these, and a superposition.

Leaves will come and go, the tree will persist. Its relationship to temporality is not limited to that of a leaf. We might understand that the temporal ‘pulse’ of the leaf is faster. Time, to the leaf, passes more slowly that for the tree because its pulse is faster and thus it experiences ‘more time’ in a given span than the tree whose pulse is slow.

Time is relational for organisms. The three-leaved tree comprises a toy that can demonstrate a variety of unique properties in a simple fashion. Each leaf has its own lifespan and rate of metabolism. Its own history. But each leaf also has, at the very least, a unique relationship with time, the other leaves, »reality … and the tree.

Each leaf is ‘a temporally limited way of the tree being in the world’. They may even live for a time in the world… after falling off… physically separate from the tree… yet ‘of the tree’… demonstrating and entirely new mode of temporal relation, and span.

Consider our imaginary tree in stillness. In this state, all activity is internal to the tree. The leaves and tree are still. If we add a slight breeze, so that now the leaves and the tree are moving gently in response, the ‘amount of information’ in any given span explodes due to the continuous change introduced in the tree and leaves in movement. A stronger breeze produces even more information per span (whatever span we choose), because there is more motion and variance in each element (and their relationships) over time.

There is much more to this toy than is first apparent. Time, however, is complexly relational, and our common abstractions of this fail to enlighten us as to this crucial fact. Without a personal grasp upon it, much of our potential for understanding and, I believe, intelligence, remains occluded… and inaccessible. It is directly opposed by the universalized abstractions that hide the actual nature of time.

Which is relation. And transformation. Not spans. Abstract temporal frameworks are absolutely crucial to science and metricity. They are also absolutely deadly if they are the only authorities or stand in place of intelligent frameworks that precedence »relation.