Did you know I’m a New Year’s baby?
Today is the first day of Spring and a just beyond a week past my birthday – March 15th, the Ides (which was an ancient Roman new lunar calendar celebration marked by much wine and revelry, FYI). It is Lent. Mercury is retrograde. Suffice it to say energetics are swirling much like the snow that’s wetly hammering the East coast right now. I’m tucked inside, contemplating: the likelihood of making a 10am dance class, work schedules, illusions of time, anti-oppression advocacy and how it might mean never eating cheese again, and my tax deductions.
Spotify’s ‘Discover Weekly’ playlist is underscoring the day, and I’m briefly undone when it offers me yet another cover of Childish Gambino’s Redbone – the third in as many months. Each version strikes me worse than the last, which leads me to suspect my algorithm has a point to prove. Retrogrades are wonderful times to “re-do” – re-evaluate, -assess, -invigorate, etc., the aspects of our lives that are asking for attention, and I suspect the artificial intelligence is simply following that guidance. Or it could be trolling me, because colorism. The jury’s still out.
At the moment, I take it as a sign of synchronicity. Spotify is mirroring my rebellious feelings. Quietly – and 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 enjoy certain people/sparkling wines (plus social pressure). My truth, however, 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 super real, I’d almost always rather be in bed but not necessarily sleeping on and around midnight of December 31st because it’s often cold and generally dark plus there’s no way we’re getting home before three a.m. and it’s definitely gonna be surge pricing.
And why wouldn’t we just align our new year with Nature’s?
Then I remember: war and religion and ego-based calendars and colonization and how a portion of life seems to consist of arguably 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 it together, and that ‘life’ is also a bunch of questions we all keep answering and a bunch of choices we all keep making. And 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 – which is to remember and 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 remember to enjoy the trip.
