January of a new calendar year. For many pagans, Wiccans in particular, this is just another spoke on the Wheel. Every autumn the new calendars come out: standard twelve months beginning with January, or the newer eighteen-month versions more befitting the academic cycle. Linear.
The year I follow is more cyclical, fluid, refusing the fit the rectangular twelve month cycle of the standard calendar makers. I follow the moon. I follow the seasons. Continuously rolling like a Wheel. I listen to the earth and sky and let them tell me where we are on the Wheel. I invite them each day to continue to teach me about living a Wheel life versus a calendar life.
How did I first move from a calendar to a Wheel life? It was a particularly dark time in my journey. A chaotic, frightening, bleak period which coincided with an unusually cold sunless Winter. January of the new calendar year arrived and yet nothing felt new. I had thrown away the old calendar, yet everything from the previous calendar year had followed me into what was being celebrated as new.
I remember arriving at the office of a friend. She had stopped on her way into work to purchase a planter of forced Daffodil bulbs. It was a riot of bright yellow on strong deep green stalks in a window reflecting the grey icy sunless world outside. And it hit me like a blast of fresh air, Spring always follows Winter.
Sounds simple, right? Somehow, in the depression of my Soul Winter, I had forgotten the simple truth that Spring always following Winter. What I was experiencing on a soul level had a cycle that reflected that of nature. Spring would follow the Winter of my soul. Joy would come again.
Nature continued its odd coincidental mirroring of the state of my soul as the ice melted and the earliest Spring watery sunshine washed the grey skies. I headed for a local park to search for physical signs of Spring. I paid attention to my dreams and journal entries for signs of the Soul Spring. I journaled quite a bit on the cycles of my life and nature’s cycle and found myself the Wheel. I made peace with the reality that there will be Winter times of my soul, just as there will Spring, Summer and Fall.
Now I journey with the Wheel and the twelve-month calendars mean little to me. Spring follows Winter with it’s newness, fresh-beginnings and signs of hope and renewal. Summer follows Spring with ripening, celebrations and heightened sexuality. Fall follows Summer with harvest, stewardship and roots. Winter follows Fall, turning inward, community and home crafts. And it turns and turns and turns…never ending. No new year, but a continuing journey to Self, to Community and to Diety. A Wheel way of life.
I still keep the linear calendars. Pretty pictures.
