On New Year’s Eve – this one – I have a sadness in my throat. Not acute, it is one that has been somewhere a long time…down in, tucked away. A sadness I have carried, sometimes unknowingly, into everything before now. A sadness cast on me as a child; one I did not ask for, and yet, I nurtured it and held it close, because sometimes it was the only familiar thing to feel.
Sadness. I am melancholy, I said, I have a lyrical soul. I need sadness to express myself. Sadness became my muse. Maybe it is my trilogy of Cancer placements: Moon in her home, Mars and Mercury struggling through watery depths – anger, expression, creativity, all felt through tears. Yet, crabs must rise from water sometimes to sit on sturdy land or scuttle about in shallow tide pools. And I never let myself go there.
I do not celebrate any new year on January 1st. This calendar was created by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE, and canonised by a pope, Gregory XIII in 1582 – 12 months, 365 days, and a leap day – to serve the interests of the Catholic Church. It also conveniently aided the Church in its mission to Christianise the pagans of Northern Europe by turning all of their existing celebrations into Christian ones.
The ancients all moved into a new cycle at the Spring Equinox, in March or September depending on the hemisphere (Christians removed our connection to nature and made that into Easter, the worst holiday ever thrust on humankind). Spring Equinox is the time of thawing, a return of longer days of sunshine, when crops could be planted, there was renewed warmth and flowers came to bud. That feels the right moment for a new year, when the cycle completes. It is also unsurprisingly when the astrological cycle resets, because our connections to the sky are carried in the seasons.
January in this hemisphere is the deadest of Winter; a time we should be deep in hibernation, huddled under blankets, by fires, still telling stories of the old ways, the stars and time. It is no moment for new starts. Now we are still in the dark, covered in soil, waiting to sprout. And we need our time in the dark.
I can feel the sadness I have held leaving me. Already a knot rising out of my throat towards my Cancerous eyeballs in floods of self-made water that will wash it away.
I’ll let it go now. And sleep more, until Spring calls, petalous and nectar-scented.
Megan Eaves-Egenes 