The turning wheel
One of the reasons I embraced paganism is that I wanted to feel more in touch with the seasons and the turning of the year. When I was little, I imagined the year to be like a circle or clock: Christmas was at 12:00, Easter at 3:00, the Fourth of July at 6:00, and Halloween at 9:00. I was somewhat off, but that’s pretty close to the pagan wheel of the year. As I grew older, I became more and more irked by the calendar definitions of the changeover from season to season. I mean, anybody who’s lived in New England can tell you that it starts to feel like winter WAY before December 21st. I wanted to celebrate the seasons by how they felt, by the changes in the weather and the earth, which is what the seasons actually are. As I learned more about paganism, I looked to the pagan calendar - the solstices and equinoxes and cross-quarter days - to remedy what I felt was erroneous in our secular calendar.
At first, this simply meant shifting the “wheel” in my head, as if I’d taken a circular 12-month calendar and superimposed a translucent circle with quarters for each season on top of it -- with just a 1/8th counterclockwise shift, the first day of winter now lined up with Samhain, the first day of spring with Imbolc, the first of summer with Beltane, and the first of fall with Lughnassa. This fell into place nicely with the old words for Yule and Litha: midwinter and midsummer. In my mind, the 21st of December felt a lot more like the middle of winter than the first day of it, and it made sense that winter would span the lead-up to the longest night of the year and the weeks after, when the sun was starting to return.
This adjustment made the seasons and dates line up a little better and soothed my literal-minded need to categorize things. However, it wasn’t perfect. In New England, it sure doesn’t start feeling like fall at the end of August, nor does the beginning of February feel like the start of spring. Both fall and spring are shorter and the changes in them more rapid than winter and summer are (much to my regret).
This year, I’ve felt particularly attuned to the change of the seasons. It’s not really anything I’ve done differently… I’ve tried to notice every year, but this year I feel like I had more cause or more opportunity to watch the wheel turn. In the spring when I was sick, being outside was one of the only things that made me feel better. At work, there’s a pond behind my office and a swath of long grasses and reeds between the parking lot and the water. I’ve been going out there almost every day, just to stand and breathe in the air and soak up the sun. It’s amazing what you see when you watch something grow over several seasons. I saw the cattails turn from green pencils to brown sausages and then bubble with fluff, wooly seed motes that floated in the air around me on my walk at lunch today. I saw dark purple spears appear at the tips of the long grasses and then bloom like fireworks into burgundy tufts, which have now mellowed to silver-gold. I saw purple crown-vetch replaced by Queen Anne’s lace replaced by asters. I saw butterflies give way to wasps and bumblebees who then made room for dragonflies.
It strikes me now that trying to delineate the seasons, trying to make the dates line up with the changes I see, is just as silly as trying to cram anything else into a neat, easily describable box. The number on the calendar is meaningless, because the shift between seasons is gradual and awe-inspiring and just as much its own “season” as any other. In fact, the time “between” seasons is always my favorite, because I love to watch the changes: to taste that first scent of crisp, dry grass on the air that signals autumn, to see the monarch butterflies appear.
Happy Mabon <3
At first, this simply meant shifting the “wheel” in my head, as if I’d taken a circular 12-month calendar and superimposed a translucent circle with quarters for each season on top of it -- with just a 1/8th counterclockwise shift, the first day of winter now lined up with Samhain, the first day of spring with Imbolc, the first of summer with Beltane, and the first of fall with Lughnassa. This fell into place nicely with the old words for Yule and Litha: midwinter and midsummer. In my mind, the 21st of December felt a lot more like the middle of winter than the first day of it, and it made sense that winter would span the lead-up to the longest night of the year and the weeks after, when the sun was starting to return.
This adjustment made the seasons and dates line up a little better and soothed my literal-minded need to categorize things. However, it wasn’t perfect. In New England, it sure doesn’t start feeling like fall at the end of August, nor does the beginning of February feel like the start of spring. Both fall and spring are shorter and the changes in them more rapid than winter and summer are (much to my regret).
This year, I’ve felt particularly attuned to the change of the seasons. It’s not really anything I’ve done differently… I’ve tried to notice every year, but this year I feel like I had more cause or more opportunity to watch the wheel turn. In the spring when I was sick, being outside was one of the only things that made me feel better. At work, there’s a pond behind my office and a swath of long grasses and reeds between the parking lot and the water. I’ve been going out there almost every day, just to stand and breathe in the air and soak up the sun. It’s amazing what you see when you watch something grow over several seasons. I saw the cattails turn from green pencils to brown sausages and then bubble with fluff, wooly seed motes that floated in the air around me on my walk at lunch today. I saw dark purple spears appear at the tips of the long grasses and then bloom like fireworks into burgundy tufts, which have now mellowed to silver-gold. I saw purple crown-vetch replaced by Queen Anne’s lace replaced by asters. I saw butterflies give way to wasps and bumblebees who then made room for dragonflies.
It strikes me now that trying to delineate the seasons, trying to make the dates line up with the changes I see, is just as silly as trying to cram anything else into a neat, easily describable box. The number on the calendar is meaningless, because the shift between seasons is gradual and awe-inspiring and just as much its own “season” as any other. In fact, the time “between” seasons is always my favorite, because I love to watch the changes: to taste that first scent of crisp, dry grass on the air that signals autumn, to see the monarch butterflies appear.
Happy Mabon <3