It’s 10:35 pm on New Year’s Eve, 2010.
It’s almost 2011.
This is supposed to mean something. The end of a year and the beginning of another. But for some reason, this year the movement from one year to another doesn’t seem so clear to me. Life feels much more fluid than what the clock and calendar might indicate. The systems we humans have created to structure this world seem so obviously contrived.
I’ve been noticing lately just how much is made up in our world.
Take today, for instance. I was sitting with Jeff outside on the veranda at the Inn at Spanish Bay. We were having lunch in front of the fire pit, gazing out at the ocean. Just then, a family came walking out of the hotel and sat down near us. They were all jabbering away in a language I couldn’t understand. I think it was a Slavic language. I had NO clue what they were saying. Suddenly it struck me just how much it’s all made up. It’s arbitrary. I mean here were these people speaking a language they obviously understood, but the words meant nothing to me. Nothing.
I looked around at the surrounding scenery and thought to myself, “The birds and trees and ocean don’t have a clue either. Life is just happening, regardless of what language is being spoken, regardless of what day it is, regardless of whether it its 2010 or 2011. It’s only us human beings that seem to care about dates and languages and all.
And then I realized that I am moving more to the rhythm of things than to the calendar. I’m moving more to the rhythm of the seasons and the moon. I’m listening to something deeper within me, something that’s telling me when it’s time, and that doesn’t seemed to be aligned with the calendar right now.
Sometimes this throws me off, because I feel out of sync with the ‘culture’. And I feel in sync with something else. I can’t tell you with clear words what it is. I just know it is a felt sense, a rhythm of the seasons, an intuition, a palpable intelligence that doesn’t pay attention to the calendar.
In some loose way the calendar follows this intelligence, following the flow of the months. But the end of the year is arbitrary, is it not?
It feels as though moving between these two is important. The feminine is about symbols and signs, rhythms and moons, and flow. The masculine is linear, structured and staccato. Coming into balance means bringing these two together. Learning to listen to my internal rhythms, to what I sense in the unseen, to what I know as wisdom, and bringing that into a focused and clear intention and direction in life.
I know that even in the first days of this new year, we will still be in the dark days of winter, still spending time within ourselves. The days are still short and the nights long. While we are moving towards spring, winter has really just begun. There is newness, and yet much of what is happening is happening down in the dark where light has not yet shone.
What feels important in these moments is to remember that while we humans have created this world of structure, of language, of calendars and deadlines, there is another world from which we came, and in which we still live. It doesn’t follow these delineated lines. It doesn’t speak in words. It communicates in a completely different language, a language in which we all can understand each other, even if we have no clue what each others’ words mean.
As I witnessed this family today, the family whose language I could not understand, I watched their interactions. At one point, the little boy began to whine when his older brother was mean to him. Then his Mother began to comfort him, taking her head and holding it close to his. His sounds changed from whining to a kind of cooing as she whispered in his ear. This language was clear. I understood what was happening, even if I didn’t know their words.
There is a commonality we all have, even in the midst of our diversity. We come from one family, and we are still this one family. This world from which we came still weaves itself amidst the tight and contracted world we interact in on a day-to-day basis.
May we all remember this world, finding our way again to this place where we are not tethered to a clock, nor chained to some abstract ladder of worth. May we find our own rhythm and hear our internal wisdom.
Happy New Year. Happy New Way.
Julie, this is such a thoughtful piece, thank you. I have to confess I didn’t really feel a smidgeon of anything when the clock moved into the New Year (or Christmas for that matter), and all the rituals that have built up round about them seem tired and stale. They don’t seem to connect to me at all.
In times gone by this might have made me feel lonely, but having come to a place where my sense of connection with the natural world is so much stronger, and to a place where my sense of connection with other people exploring similar thoughts and responses is so much deeper… it no longer troubles me. Other forces are at work 🙂
I will though wish you a very happy new year x
Thank you Julie
– and Joanna – for writing what is true for you, and also I suspect many others. How reassuring that beneath all the manic rituals of modern life there remains for each of us a deeper more naturally purposeful reality. I look forward to following your articles in 2011. Thank you!
Thank you once again Julie, for clarifying something I haven’t been able to put words to. I’ve felt pushed by the world of arbitrary endings and beginnings to reflect and project, but I haven’t really felt it in my heart and soul. You helped me see why. I’m in the middle of something, not at the beginning or the end, and it feels made up to pretend I am. I felt strongly in September the beginning of a new movement for myself and I’m just in the midst of that process. It isn’t the end, nor the beginning. Thank you for highlighting the underlying rhythm and acknowledging that it’s okay to move with what we feel.
Thank yo Julie for such an insightful post and the clarity of its content. I agree that by listening and observing the rhythms of life we allow ourselves to evolve and honour the eternal feminine . I feel more centred after reading this and conneceted to Source,
Wishing you a joyous blessed 2011
Love and light Ahrabella Heabe ( Arabella) Lewis
I am so pleased to see others writing about this … thanks for sharing Julie
I have been using the 13 Moon system for a few years now and it works so much better than our calendar – which is man-made and inaccurate. July and August come eponymously from Roman emperors and have thrown the numbering of Sept onwards out.
The solstice on 21st Dec is the true New Year too …
You might enjoy this link …
http://www.thebookwright.com/2009/11/02/writing-in-tune-with-the-moon/
& also see http://www.13moon.com
Luv, luk & lux
Happy being Julie! Your post has confirmed what for a long time has been my own internal feeling and like Joanna, it’s a great relief to now have the connection and understanding of others who feel the same.
What a nice, thoughtful piece – thank you.
Time started when sailors needed to co-ordinate latitude and longitude – time had to be reckoned by Greenwich Mean Time. Its the explorers, therefore, who have a lot to answer for!
Julie,
Thank you–As I read through this piece on New Years Day morning, I feel calmer, more settled in my own rhythm, less driven by the “staccato” all around me. As Jackie says, what a great relief.
Angela
I loved reading this. I just wrote something very similar about natural rhythms and ‘new year’. Happy January to you.
Well said! You made me so happy on this morning when I felt like I was the only one. We must be swimming in the same fluid stream. The natural rhythms and flow of life are far more important to me this year than calendars and ticking clocks. May 2011 be a time when scoreboards of all kinds are turned off, what a boon to creativity and goodness that would be. All the best to you today.
I love this. Once again, you are so in tune with the space my heart is in.
I’ve been thinking lately of how the spiral is a much more common shape in nature than the square. We aren’t meant to fit in boxes, or move within linear frames. We’re meant to follow the circle of seasons, the spiral of passing time and of growth.
I was tired of seeing the years go by in a blur, so this year I tried to live more mindfully and according to the seasons. It’s been a more natural way to live and very healing, so thank you for your words. I welcome the reflections in solitude of the season instead of dreading them.
What a wonderful post to read, Julie, in this season of arbitrary beginnings. Like you, it is the seasons and the moon that truly set the rhythm of my year. Your words reflect my own experience and provide food for further thought and contemplation. Thank you!
I am new to Unabashedly Female and am moved and inspired.
Your words in this post, “I just know it is a felt sense, a rhythm of the seasons, an intuition, a palpable intelligence…” reminded me of Wordsworth, in his “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey”:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”
I try not to spend too much time in the blogosphere, but yours is shifting my perspective and already I feel a sense of community here. Thank you.
oh yes, jewels. yes. you know how i do love the dark night, the moon, the time when and the place where it’s safe, where anything is possible, where everything makes sense in that way where making sense doesn’t matter or even compute, for that matter. as good as it feels to check things off the list, as accomplishment-oriented as i can be, i find myself shifting into the never-never land of spirals and circles and hands with no clockface looking over their knuckles. i love how you bring all of us to the table – birds, oceans, women, men, languages, clocks, boxes, circles, spirals – you seat us all together without distinction at a table covered with a festive cloth woven of differences and acceptance.