I'm writing this at the First Quarter of the Blackberries Ripen Moon, on the evening of RainReturn. For the three days before, I enjoyed our annual Island Earthfair, beginning with our celebration of Lammas - the cross-quarter festival honoring the first harvest. I am inspired to play with my concept of time by the 13 Moon Natural Time Calendar, which was presented at Island Earthfair. According to this Calendar, which is based on the ancient Mayan calendar, we are in the First Moon of the new year. The new year began on July 26 (Gregorian calendar), with the annual helical rising of Sirius - the brightest fixed star in the sky. Now, I'm not exactly sure what a "helical rising" means, though the term clearly points to some alignment with the Sun, but having the new year begin on July 26 makes fine sense to me. My birthday is July 29, and this year I turned 40. Believe me, I feel like I've stepped into a new year!
This Mayan-based calendar is a bit too galactic for me to settle into easily (though some of the harmonic/vibratory terminology resonates for me, as a musician fascinated with harmonic theory). But I love the idea of returning to natural cycles as a way of noting the passage of Chronos (or linear) time. Despite the terminology embedded in this calendar, the 13-Moon 28 Day Natural Time Calendar does offer this. Of course, other folks have been exploring natural time as well. With its attention to the cycles of the Moon, Sun, planets, and stars in relation to the earth, The We'Moon calendar is an obvious source. Another one I enjoy is not so obvious: my Puget Sound edition Tidelog. The Tidelog visually represents daily tides and the arcs of the Sun and Moon across the passage of the hours, and even notes the weekly positions of the five visible planets and various planetary and lunar events.
I am also fascinated by the ECOlogical Calendar, a work in progress that poetically describes the passage of each day against a visual backdrop of tides, the Sun's relation of daylight to darkness through the course of the year, lunar phases, and the night sky. The date is calculated from the beginning of time (modern science's best estimate). So today is: 13.7B 2003 8 5, or 13.7 billion years since the Big Bang, 2003 since Jesus birth (Gregorian calendar) or 2003 Common Era, the 8th month and 5th day. The beauty of this particular calendar is in the names chosen for the months (alas, Gregorian based rather than lunar based), such as "Celeste" for January and "Sleet" for February, and for the days, such as "Blueflicker" and "Clearnight" and "WindChill". The day names are taken from lines of poetry that form a nature-based narrative that runs through the calendar. For instance: "BlueFlicker when high humidity makes stars shimmer. ClearNight signals the coming of the WindChill factor which drops the temperature causing ..." My linguistic fascination with Old English, where two words were often combined to form a poetic single word (such as "daegred" - "day-red" meaning "Dawn") particularly loves this aspect of the calendar.
Chronos time, often referred to as "clock-time" has gotten the bad reputation of being relentless in its fragmentation of time, and with (particularly in the Gregorian calendar system) its lack of connection with *real* time, with natural cycles. But Chronos *is* about rhythms, both human-generated (like minutes, seconds, and the current version of our months) *and* natural. Certainly the argument that our current time-system's (and modern culture's compulsion to cram as much activity as possible into each day) lack of connection with natural cycles has done much to intensify our culture's beyond-dangerous disconnect with the earth is, I think justified. But just as tragic, in my opinion, is human-kind's loss of the poetry, music and *companionship* of knowing the dance movements of the Sun, Moon, tides, planets and stars. That's the beauty that these other calendar forms offer, and I for one am delighting in dipping into these essential rhythms. The more aware I become, the more deeply their music resonates in the patterns of my life, the more their dance influences my own steps, the more personally I respond to the patterns around me.
And so I've chosen to come up with my own names for the Moons and the Days. Those of you on Vashon Island and in the Pacific Northwest will nod regarding the Moon names (or at least this one!). The day names may end up being more island-, or even personal-centered. Still, there are ways to relate the poetry of one's own response to rhythms to more universally known markers: such as my reference to Lammas, which most earth-rhythm based folk will recognize, or the AllTime date of the ECOlogical Calendar, which combines Universe-time with our civilization's Gregorian-time. In any case, I encourage you to explore the rhythms of time that make the most sense to you, or that are the most compelling to you at this moment. Becoming aware of even just one cycle will help you to weave more richly into the beautiful patterns and ebbs and flows that embrace us in each jewel-moment, in each spin of our day and night, and each sweep of our journey through space.
References:
13 Moon Natural Time Calendar, published by SkyTime
www.13moon.com
503-293-6460
We'Moon: Gaia Rhythms For Womyn, published by Mother Tongue Ink,
P.O. Box 1395-A, Estacada, OR 97023
www.wemoon.ws
Toll free: 877-693-6666
Tidelog, published by Pacific Publishers
Box 480, Bolinas CA 94924
www.tidelog.com
415-868-2909 or 888-TIDELOG
Editions available for most of the US East and West Coasts and for Puget Sound.
More about the ECOlogical calendar:
www.alltime.info
or read:
"Reimagining the Days of Our lives" by Karen Olsen
UTNE, Jan-feb 2003, p. 68-69.