Y is for Years

I think it's something about becoming a parent that has given me a greater tendency to look at the rhythms of years.  It's also something about being a calendar nut, religiously, and doing that building work, trying to get a sense of rhythms of the year from that way.  Some of it has to do with the holistic look at the year I was asked to take as part of my training, figuring out my own seasons of action and recovery.

Twenty years pagan, now, more or less.  I suspect maybe someone might start taking me seriously.  Probably coming up on ten of those Kemetic, goodness, I almost might know what I'm doing by now.  Time is a complicated and confounding thing, and I'm not used to being on the experienced end of things - but I suspect, these days, that I might be.  Seven years studying the Craft, on and off.  And so on and so forth.

I think about the shapes of years.  Ebbs and flows, where they flex.  Solar years, stellar years: not quite the same thing.  Twelve-month lunar years, thirteen-month lunar years, lunar years with great years to keep things evened out a bit: also complicated.  When does the year begin?  Solstices are nice points, with their extremes of day and night; other events might matter more, though, and the shapes of things are complicated.  The Western secular calendar year is not well-attached to its origins anymore, and the why of when things fall is one of those things that takes research too.

It's worth thinking about our years.  When do you fall in love?  When do all your projects stall out?  What are the patterns, if any?  (It's interesting to me how oddly similarly my personal calendar maps to the school calendar in the United States, in its way, as if I never shifted the shape of my year from my childhood - or as if that particular set of rhythms happens to be one congruent with my own, and someone who would rather start their new projects in the summer rather than the autumn would be stymied by the vagaries of grade school.)

A year is a huge span, and a blink: having children certainly changes the view of time.  A year ago there was an infant blob in the house, fussing and squalling, and today a toddling gleeface tacklehugged me on her way to investigating the books left out on my floor.  That is huge.  And yet I so often feel I am doing the same things all the time, the things that I've done every day, and the only way I can tell that I've actually been working is that the shit I'm shovelling has changed.  It's an Aegean life, sometimes.

I don't know.  I'm philosophical tonight, or something.  It's getting towards winter, which is a time for secret growth for me.  Perhaps that means philosophy, in its season.