Happy "New Beginnings" Says My Head (and the collective around me)
Happy Full Bloom says this body steeped in Mid-Summer Heat
Every human needs to believe they can start anew. And so it is also for me. It is a new beginning, the birth of 2024.
Even if it is all just a continuous unfolding, it’s a new beginning, they say. Even if the line between the start and the end is almost impossible to distinguish, it’s still a new beginning.
Even if, in truth, we all know we’ll carry on the unfolding indefinitely.
Messages start arriving in my inbox. Sweetness is sent by friends and family and I do the same in return. I notice the magic of such a spell working on me. Happy 2024, we all say.
It is powerful to hear and read words that tell me the year is starting now and that I can relax my nervous system and “let go of the old”.
This thought, this construct that tells us that there is such a thing as a line in the sand, functions as a magic wand and has me (us?) act in a way that catalyzes renewal. It seems like it works for me and the world, so I’ll let it in.
The power of the mind that lives, breathes, and creates together becomes clear on such dates.
We are, truly, all starting fresh. Are we not?
New diets, new impulses, new courses, new clothes. Everywhere I look there seems to be an invitation to shed the old and come in with the new. Plant the seeds of intention for the “new year”, even if we live in cycles within cycles that are always interpenetrating with one another, the New Year gives us a shared language, a shared momentum, and a shared impulse.
We might even believe that we are all moving in the same direction, which takes us to a collective new beginning like a flash mob. All dancing, in synchronized steps, towards…somewhere?
I am happy to play with such constructs if they are helpful. But first, we need to see through them.
If Calendars in antiquity were lunisolar, designed to “time keep” in synch with what was happening on the Earth, the calendars we now follow, an “updated version” of the Julian calendar, that - by the way - no longer depended on the observation of the new moon but followed an algorithm of introducing a leap day every four years, cemented this dissociation of the calendar month from the lunation.
So much so that we don’t even recognize it as “dissociation”.
So we celebrate the new year and new beginnings despite it not being in sync with the New Year of the Earth, symbolized by the energy of early spring when we can see life sprouting everywhere.
Even if devoid of rhythm, we still believe it.
We are, after all, descendants of Athena, the Wisdom Goddess born out of the forehead of Zeus and not out of the womb of Gaia.
Thoughts and concepts that are not embodied still lure us. They are powerful memes. But the movement toward reconnection starts as we see through the constructs together.
So, in this New Year, let’s start something new. ;-)
Let’s change the image we have in our minds (or maybe I had in my mind) of what it would look like for something/someone to be born out of the forehead of a man. Maybe, changing my mental picture would help me (us?) add some humor to our journey of re-membering.
I here present a couple of iterations of my new Zeus!
Being born out of a disembodied head, all of a sudden looks slightly more…mmm… uncomfortable.
Ok, crazy idea.
What if Athena was born out of… a Womb?
What if this was the image we collectively held of the birth of the Goddess of Wisdom?
I wonder how this would impact our notion of what wisdom is.
It’s a crazy thought but, you know, in the spirit of new beginnings, how about we shake things up a bit in our 2024 version of Mythology?
I seem to be thoroughly enjoying this “new beginning” thing.
With Wisdom now being born out of the Womb of Gaia, let’s contextualize this early 2024 for us folks in the Southern Hemisphere, where it is the middle of Summer.
It is certainly not an energy of new beginnings but of Full Blossom.
Loud bird songs punctuate the celebratory sounds of the cicadas. The plants are also saying “full bloom” through their narrative of flower blossoms and ripening fruits.
Meanwhile, in the Northern Hemisphere, the Earth is not birthing itself anew just yet, as you might know in your bones if you are from there. She is dreaming.
In some places surrounded by a blanket of snow, in others, enveloped by the subtle cloak of cold air. No, not yet a new beginning. She is still asleep. Shhh!
My new year started when the first leaves made themselves visible on the trees in my garden a few months ago. When the bees reappeared and the birds reminded my whole body that the Earth was awake.
The seasons envelop us and our senses in the beginnings and endings that come from within her and spiral us into movement. Our thoughts, impulses, and actions, just like the inhales and exhales of a larger body, are in sync with the movement of our planet.
The Northern Hemisphere does its dark dance thing whilst the Southern Hemisphere bathes the Earth in light and then they swap. A larger dance of yin and yang works as the micro-context of smaller variations of this same dance.
But no.
To us, modern humans, to have individuated has meant that we can dance to our rhythm, even though there is a tune already playing. It means that we are entitled to “do our own thing”, to “be ourselves” and to carry on dancing to a tune we have ourselves created. Even if it clashes with everything around us.
Dancing to your song with headphones, imagining to have a shared reality, is not the same as sharing music and rhythm with other bodies.
If constructs have power, collective constructs have tremendous power. They create, as Ken Wilber would say, groves in consciousness. Dents in reality, modes of expression, pathways of thinking that are extremely hard to bypass. They have a life of their own.
Just like sand would fall through the middle of a paper folded in half, our thoughts and actions work the same way.
Unfolding the paper is hard. It requires that we notice that the paper doesn’t have to be folded in that way. That the fold is the result of a way of thinking and acting that might not be working in our favor anymore and that it can (and should) be changed.
If only we could remember how to feel the pulse of the Earth, our celebrations could reflect that pulse in its various ways and we could re-learn how to create incredible dance from that shared music.
With all of the above as a backdrop, this New Year was special to me.
Not because it had fireworks or big parties. Not because it was grand in any way. It was quiet. Family games and a beautiful midnight swim at the river in front of our house.
Darkness all around, the softness of the water, kids laughing. Bright mid-summer busyness recalibrated by gentle darkness.
All of it is seen through fresh eyes. From the vantage point of day 106 of my menstrual cycle. Yes, another cycle!
What does that even mean, you might ask?
It means that the lenses through which I have seen and interacted with reality for the past 35 years are shifting quite dramatically.
The modern world calls this time in the life of a woman peri-menopause but the medical name is so color-free it bores me. It is a construct I chose to throw away.
Happy New Year!
This phase, it turns out, works as a fantastic guide to new ways of knowing.
It was through the lenses afforded by this 106th day of my cycle, with less estrogen than I have ever lived with as an adult female, that I welcomed the construct of this new year.
I couldn’t “just” say Happy New Year. I had to situate it.
This is because I seem to be engaging with reality as if every single little misstep can mess up the whole dance. Maybe this was always the case. Maybe it is not even true. But to me, from the chrysalis of my yet unborn wise woman self ( to be fully born post-menopause, for some, I hear) the stakes are higher than ever before.
So, just like this, my threshold met the threshold between the years of 2023 and 2024. A line in the sand of awareness.
This crossing of the threshold between the old and the new, this construct that carries so much power in our psyches and that allows us space to reimagine how things could be, serves the purpose of renewing our sense of hope, of strength, of agency. So we can not drown in despair of the way things are, of the way things were, and believe we can start again. I take in the invitation to pause, to start fresh, whilst the plants in my garden are going wild.
All of a sudden, my Athena, who grew up believing she had been born of the head of Zeus, realized she had been born of the womb of Gaia. Quite a shock, I’ll let you know.
I can now participate in this and other constructs born out of the mind of men whilst seeing through them.
I gladly accept the invitation to plant new seeds of thought. I chose to use the power bestowed on me by the construct of the Gregorian Calendar.
So here it is. My words. My spell.
May 2024 be a year of deep re-memberence. And so it is. By the power of the New Year.
May we collectively bring Athena back to the womb. Being born out of a forehead, as seen in the above pictures of our new Zeus is not ideal, would you agree?
May we recognize ourselves as the sons and daughters of Athena, and become aware of our role in repeating patterns that reinforce the myth of the “head birth”,
May we re-member how to dance our dance to the rhythm that is always been there.
May we embody the power required by the current times and yet re-imagine what needs to be reimagined.
May my Northern Hemisphere friends not rush the rebirth phase. Your thoughts might be following the impulse of the cosmic grove already decided for you, but your body knows the rhythm it needs to follow.
May my Southern Hemisphere friends open their hearts fully to take in the light of the sun as it shines bright in our lives, whilst at times remembering to sit under the canopy of a tree and rest in its shades.
And to all of us, may 2024 be a year in which we reconnect to life pulses and rhythms and listen to what is ours to do.
C-Lab will be active in this mission. Hope you come and play.
Happy “New” Year! :-)
Adri
It’s always a pleasure to read your insights my dear and I wish you a great and fruitful new beginning!
Um beijo