#16: What's a calendar and why does it feel like time is going insanely fast sometimes?
or, some ways to be present without meditating.
Upcoming Astrology:
There are plenty of week ahead resources out there (the CHANI podcast is a good one), so each week I spend a little longer providing a focused interpretation of one dynamic in the sky.
Full Moon in Aries on Friday morning, 5:57AM ET: Our next full moon is already upon us! This full moon in Aries is the peak of the cycle that started with the new moon in Aries on April 20 this year. If you’re following the cycles, you can reflect back to that time and think about what seeds you were planting. You can expect to harvest whatever fruit you grew about now. This is where you hope it’s a fruit you meant to plant and not something poisonous or invasive.
An Aries Moon is colored by the cardinal, fire nature of it. I wrote a bit about the way Aries and Libra balance each other last week and how Aries manifests action, inspiration, bold movement, leadership, and intensity. Look at where Aries falls in your chart and consider if anything in that area needs you to take action.
A few famous folks with Aries Moons: Whitney Houston, Angelina Jolie, Andy Warhol, Marlon Brando, Lauren Bacall, Salvador Dali, and, for my housewives girls, Dorinda Medley.
I’m complicating my relationship with time and think it’s a good idea to do.
I asked my sister what I should write about this week and she told me she was curious about leap years. They have a pretty straight forward history and are a practicality really, but this got me thinking about our experience of time and the technologies we develop to understand it.
Leap years happen because the solar year (the time it takes the Earth to revolve around the Sun) takes about 365.25 days. Thus, every four years, we’ve earned another day and it becomes our leap day and we get to use it however we want. Leap years have sort of nothing to do with astrology. That being said, the idea of a leap year baby is a nice way to illustrate a basic and important concept about the birth chart, which is that it only roughly correlates to the calendar. We use the calendrical date and time of a birth to identify where things are in a given moment, but then the cycles unfold without tracking perfectly to our artificial cycles.
You can be born on September 22 and be a Virgo or you can be a Libra, depending on the year and where you were born. Also, some years, the moment the Sun returns to the place it was when you were born happens the day before or after the day you were born. By astrological (and astronomical) standards, that would be the “correct” day to celebrate a trip around the sun. That’s the anniversary of the moment you took your first breath.
Calendars and our way of dividing up the year are technologies that humans came up with. This current one, the Gregorian Calendar, was dropped in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII. His papal administration developed it because they wanted to fix the drift of the calendar away from the equinoxes and other astronomical events that correlated to religious ceremonies. It replaced the Julian Calendar which assumed the year was 365.25 days long. This wasn’t quite precise enough, so the Gregorian Calendar uses a 365.2425 day year with the rule that every year divisible by 4 is a leap year with an extra day in February, unless the year is divisible by 100 and not divisible by 400. Thus, our calendar. The days don’t line up year to year but they do always hover around the correct solar events.
Because you can read the Wikipedia page about calendars if you want that history, I’m going to pivot to what this means for astrology and what kinds of questions this prompts for me and maybe for you since you’re reading this. What does it mean that we build our own measurements of time?
First we might think about what it means to “experience time”. How do you distinguish between a short amount of time and a long amount of time if you don’t use calendars or clocks? Rather than time, you’re really just experiencing the present moment, and then the next present moment, and the next. Admittedly, this is very much a high thought. Still, it’s true, and time passing only begins to make sense when you consider it as something that is relational. It’s the consideration of comparing “now” with your memory of another “now” that happened some other time when things in the material world were different. Maybe those different things were the dates on the calendar and maybe they were the locations of the stars in the sky (or both).
There have always been different ways of keeping time and forming meaning. The Chinese calendar, first developed some time in the 14th Century BCE is lunisolar, combining lunar months and the solar year. The Mayans and Aztecs both used two calendars, one 260-day calendar for divinatory and ceremonial purposes and a second solar calendar of 365 days for agriculture. They operated together as a 52-year cycle of uniquely named days.
Egyptians as early as 2,500 B.C.E were using twelve, 30-day months with an additional five days at the end of the year called “Intercalary Days”. This made it so the months aligned to the rising and peaking of different fixed, bright stars. The most significant of these is Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. Its heliacal rise (when it becomes visible above the eastern horizon just before sunrise) signaled the impending flooding of the Nile nearly every year. These floods brought fertile soil to the delta and were primary forces that allowed the development of Egyptian civilization at the time.
I like to think about what these different ways of keeping time do to your sense of it. What if you marked your year not just with the amount of light from our sun and its movement through the sky, but also the emergence and retreat of Sirius? What does that kind of bifurcated attention do to your own passage through time?
When I was very little, summer lasted a long time. It stretched on farther than I could comprehend once I got out of school in May. I knew somehow it would contain trips to see my grandma in Kansas, to visit Colorado with my family, summer day camps, long days of doing nothing, swimming at the Inn of the Hills pool, SeaWorld trips, and many visits to the library. It was an amount of “stuff” that I could not imagine fitting into a timespan that was anything but endless. Then, as I got older, I got used to days passing. My experience of the time relationships that make up days, weeks, months, and a summer break became mundane. Eventually, three months of summer break felt small. The cycle of the Sun’s light appearing and disappearing every day and the changing lengths of day are familiar to me now, and they are smaller.
Of course, the experience of time is not something that’s entirely limited to the psychological or philosophical. Though there’s not consensus on this, there are biological and physical changes that we go through that likely result in a changing experience of time. One theory suggests that our ability to perceive the changing momentary experience degrades with age, almost like we’re downgrading from the high-tech 4K camera of youth to a lower quality camcorder in our later years. In any case, for me, this and other physical explanations make all the stronger case for exploring how shifts in my attention translate to changes in my psychological or spiritual experience of the day to day.
In astrology, there are some quickly recurring cycles and some that you don’t get to witness in a human life. We get three or four Mercury retrogrades per year, but you will probably only get to see Uranus go around the Zodiac once, assuming you live at least 84 years. Neptune takes about 82 years to just get to the opposite side of the Zodiac from where it was when you were born. You’re not going to get to see Neptune’s whole cycle. Watching these bodies move through the sky and reflecting on how they relate to my life is a way of manipulating my experience of time. When things are ugly and when they’re idyllic I can consider those feelings in the scope of all these different qualities of time and appreciate the scale.
You don’t have to study astrology to experience this. Some of my friends garden and I’ve watched their relationships with seasons develop to the point that they’re clearly in touch with a different time relationship. I’ve heard meditation puts you in touch with time in some similar ways, though I’ve never managed it. I think belief in a god sometimes helps people work through this question of scale. Probably parenting confronts you with time in a similar way.
Whatever it is, I do think that this is an activity or a ritual or pattern that is necessary for us. The Gregorian Calendar is much more efficient for planning the agriculture business than if you had to watch for when Sirius appeared on the horizon, but I find it encourages time to speed past in a way that is less than ideal. We need some kind of access point to feeling our place in time in different ways. To really experience the time we have here, we need relationships that give that time a sense of scale.
Thank you for reading! Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.