a weekend show
I live in the faith of Natural Time. It allows me to access rhythms much deeper and more organic than our broken Gregorian months. It gives a meaning to the days that elapse that is broader than our cultural identifications with weekdays and weekends, a payday and a holiday. It allows time to be a fluid experience of building and breaking – like a wave – rather than a measure that separates and binds, like a calendar grid. I am female and I embrace a calendar that is born out of the cycles of my body but also, magically, correlates with our earth’s interplay with the masculine energy of the sun.
The calendar is for men, women and children. It is full of beauty in the language of the day names, full of reverence for nature and the organic life of plants, animals and the cosmos. It is a way to connect with the lost indigenous cultures that pre-existed Gregorian, linear, church-decreed time. It is a way to play with magic. It is a natural rhythm that crests in an upswell of amazing synchronicity, dissolves to take us deeper into our own core – and each other’s – and reforms once more for another cycle of spectacular transformation.
The Maya used an expression to greet each other and the energy of each new day: reflecting on the natural world of plants, animals, the cosmos and humanity, they would say, in lak’ech, ‘I am another yourself.’ I invite you into a world of mirrors that will remind you of your own beauty and resonance as a brilliant thread in the larger weave.
The Natural Time Calendars
Changing your calendar will change your life, and recharge it with humbling synchronicities and the kind of magic that music makes with its rhythms and harmonies. It will also give you strength, and courage, for challenges you may encounter.
It will teach you to trust the present moment as a richly enchanted spell of time, and it will feel like coming into truth, a resonant truth, to connect your mechanized life back to nature, your waking life back to the dreamtime, your daily life to eons backward and forward of communion with the sun, moon and stars.
Tzolkin Calendar
The Maya were passionate about cycles, and created many calendars to follow movements on heaven and earth. The Tzolkin was their 260-day spiritual count, offering daily points of reverence for followers to focus upon.
260 days is congruent with our human gestation of nine months. It is also the length of time for the germination of corn – the food staple of the Maya – from seed to harvest. The Tzolkin celebrates creation.
The Tzolkin days honor the integral parts of creation, such totems as the sun, the moon, the water, the wind – as well as animals (serpent, dog, eagle) and consequential human roles (shaman, prophet, warrior). We can tune into these energies and find our modern lives infused with synchronicity connecting us to this Mayan creation mythology.
13 Moon Calendar
The Natural Time year is starkly different from the Gregorian because it starts on July 26, the ancient Mayan new year’s day when Sirius – the most powerful night star – rose alongside the sun at dawn.
It also differs from our modern calendar in having 13 months of 28 days each, instead of the erratic 30 and 31 days we currently follow. 13 x 28 = 364 (+1 day between years, called ‘The Day Out of Time.’)
These 13 months are called ‘moons’ and honor indigenous time tracking. Across the globe and on every continent, pre-colonized cultures celebrated 13 moons in a year. Natural Time seeks to resurrect this more organic rhythm for a year’s passage – one spin of our earth on its orbit around the sun.