You can’t have a society without a collective understanding of time. You can’t. Show me one. Time is the basis of everything: our idea of shared reality, what we think happens after we die, every question of faith, every approach to proof, everything. There are great similarities from culture to culture about the big mathematical details. For example, some have noticed that the sun moves the distance of its own radius every minute, it’s why we have a minute. It’s in the stuff we can’t prove and quantify where we can really see the personality of a people.
This pairing of runes, Beorc and Ger, Birch and Year, reveals what happens to a culture’s sense of time when their abundance waxes and wanes rather drastically with their living conditions. These were coastal people whose challenging waters range from confronting to inhospitable. Their cold inland weather has its own difficulties and everything depends … More
To calculate a new year or any other kind of newness, you must have some idea of oldness too. New is not new unless there’s an old. This truth requires a sense of a trajectory between one and the other, as well as a direction, so you must have some idea of a beginning in your new year reckoning. Calculations, like language, happen via a linear trajectory no matter how many forking paths it might take to get from A to B. A line is a line. This will be your main problem when determining a beginning: that temporality does not exist in the way your tools of calculation and language assume it to exist. There’s nothing linear about it. There are no beginnings. However, by wanting to calculate a new year I assume you imagine some sort of temporal line upon which you might locate your new year. Good. You will have to think … More
You are coming out of it. It’s been a long time coming. What you’ve been missing, if you have been missing out, will return soon enough. This will be a rebirth of new life. The signs are already here that you will benefit from a rich kingdom awakening to plenitude. Fruits will dangle off of vines replete with abundance, but they won’t fall into your mouth just like that chickadee, you will have to take steps and get busy.
