I’m a New Year’s baby.
I’m writing this on the first day of Spring and a week past my birthday – March 15th, the Ides, which in ancient Rome was actually a new lunar calendar celebration marked by much wine and revelry. It’s the season of Lent. Mercury is retrograde. It’s safe to say energetics are swirling much like the snow that’s currently wetly hammering the East coast.
I’m contemplating the likelihood of making a 10 AM dance class. I’m contemplating work schedules, illusions of time, anti-oppression advocacy and how it might mean never eating cheese again. I’m also contemplating my tax deductions.
A Spotify “Discover Weekly” playlist is underscoring the day, and I’m briefly undone when it offers me yet another cover of Childish Gambino’s Redbone. It’s the third one in as many months and each version strikes me worse than the last. It leads me to suspect my algorithm has a point to prove.
We tell each other that retrogrades are wonderful times to “re-do”. It’s a good time to reevaluate, reassess, reinvigorate, etc. the aspects of our lives that are asking for attention; I suspect the artificial intelligence of Spotify is simply following that guidance. Or it could be trolling me. The jury’s still out.
At the moment, I’ll take it as a sign of synchronicity as I’m feeling temporally revolutionary. Despite what calendars would have us believe, I’ve always considered Spring to be the true mark of the New Year. When I celebrate New Year’s Eve in December, it’s honestly because I’m killer at parties. And do enjoy the company of certain people and sparkling wines (plus social pressure).
The Real New Year
My truth is that I’ve never been able to fully reconcile our insistence on sticking a holiday all about newness in the middle of a time of dormancy. If we’re keeping it real, I’d almost always rather be in bed but not necessarily sleeping at midnight of December 31st. It’s often cold, generally dark, there’s no way we’re getting home before 3 AM, and there’s definitely gonna be surge pricing.
And why wouldn’t we just align our new year with Nature’s?!
Because war, religion, calendars, and colonization seems to consist of ridiculous nonsense. And while having to ride with that truth can be infuriating and exhausting, it can also be incredibly empowering – if we remind ourselves and each other that we’re gathered here to get through life together, and that “life” is also a bunch of questions we all keep answering and choices we keep making. And that we can make different choices, have different answers, and even ask different questions.
So for my birthday this year, along with the manifestation of a new high-powered blender (because I’m too grown to entertain the paradox of chunky smoothies), I gifted myself a commitment to an even deeper practice of what I preach. I will devote myself to the ways in which I’m an architect of my reality. My wish is a promise to use my birthright superpower of intuition to inspire me to choose, ask, and answer all in the direction of my best life.
And to remember to enjoy the trip.
