The deeper I get into my thirties, the more drastically the way I think changes. When I was around 24 and knew I wouldn’t return to college, I married and started settling into my career. Not just my career, though, I settled into the rest of my life… or so I thought. I thought I had peaked and the rest of my life would be smooth sailing from that high place.

Here’s what my logic was:

• I had a rough childhood, so that was a dip.

• Then I suddenly rose into a better adulthood that would be a nice plateau in my life until death sometime (hopefully) in the future.

If I had to put a visual for how I thought my life would go, I would have guessed that it would look like a square root sign used in mathematics, with the top line being my long line of adulthood until death cut it off at some point.

I thought my life was like a square root symbol. Birth, a dip with a rough childhood, a sudden rise to a much better adulthood, then straight on until death.

Back then, I thought I had reached the peak of my life: job title, marriage, car payments, house buying. I checked all the #adulting boxes off (well, not kids.. but that’s a conversation for a different day.)

Try as I might, when 28 rolled around, my delayed quarter-life crisis hit, and my perfectly unbroken adulting line suddenly crashed, and I felt as though I were at rock bottom again, constantly asking myself, “How did I mess up so bad?!”

Suddenly, a quarter-life crisis broke my perfect line and crashed when I quit my job and was on the verge of divorce.

But when I turned 31, I realized I’d been looking at my life (and Time) all wrong.

I was expecting the Earth, Time, and everything else to move linearly like I thought I was moving: shooting up quickly, then plateauing at a high point. But Time doesn’t move in a straight line; it’s not a neat grid of little squares for each day that goes on in a never-ending line (like a modern monthly calendar).

Time is cyclical, like a lot of other natural phenomena. Look at the natural world, and you’ll see what I mean: menstrual cycles, the planets as they spin and their revolution around the sun, Lunar cycles, the Earth’s seasons, and the migration patterns of birds, fish, large land animals, etc.

The natural world doesn’t move in a perfectly straight line, and friend, neither do we.

We have our ups and down and revolutions of our own. Sometimes, we face the same problems as we did when we were young, but this time around, we’re older and wiser and meet them differently. The revolutions we have in our lives may feel like ups and downs in what we think should be a straight and narrow path, but if we zoomed out and saw our entire timeline, I bet it wouldn’t look like a zig-zagging line but rather, a series of growing circles, expanding as we grow and learn.

Once I started thinking like that, the calendar provided by good ol’ Pope Gregory XIII from the 1500s didn’t work for me anymore. I yearned to look at my Time in a new way—a cyclical way—that tied back to nature more than what a bunch of old men in an organized religion decided.

Turns out, looking at the year in a cyclical way wasn’t a new idea at all, but it was a very ancient idea: the Wheel of the Year. If you google the term now, what comes up is neo-pagan, but the components of what makes up the year are ancient, indeed.

The year starts and ends with the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year, and the midpoint of it (at the bottom of the wheel) is the Summer Solstice (the longest day of the year). Making up the horizontal axis of the wheel is the equinox (both for spring and autumn). Throughout history, ancient farmers would keep their Time based on the seasons and how long the sun would be out because it directly impacted their harvest.

This is an introductory wheel of the year. If you look up “Wheel of the Year,” you’ll see some that rename the major solar events with the pagan festivals (like Yule for Winter Solstice or Imbolc for the first Cross Quarter event on February 1st.) — This image also assumes you’re in the northern hemisphere. If you’re below the quarter, feel free to relabel oppositely!

Seeing the year in a wheel like this makes me stop and realize how Time doesn’t act in the way we’ve been conditioned to think in modern culture: linear, charging on in the same direction we are. Time is cyclical, and so are the years. A year arrives back on itself, becoming reborn again and again.

Thinking like that, I created my own Wheel of the Year and added in other ideas like pagan “cross-quarter” days. (Cross-Quarters mark halfway points between the quarters marked by major solar events.. for example, Imbolc in February is a Cross-quarter day because it crosses between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox). I also added another powerful natural cycle: lunar cycles.

Below, you’ll see the Solstices and the Equinoxes in bold purple lines, Cross-Quarter days in bold pink lines, and the lunar cycles in the thin grey and gold lines with their dates (Gold lines depict full moons, and grey lines represent new moons). I’ve been using this calendar as a way to look at this year in a different light. As Time goes on, I turn my wheel.

Now, as summer starts to come to a close, I keep turning my wheel and doing so makes me feel as though I am revolving with nature rather than me charging through as though everything revolves around me.

I’m not afraid to experience ups and downs because that’s no longer how I view my life or emotions. I am part of nature, going through my seasons as the wheel turns.

If you’re more of a linear thinker or in the corporate world, think about the wheel of the year like this:

• The Solar events (solstices and equinoxes) are the beginnings of new quarters. If you are/were in corporate, you know how vital these 90-day chunks are for executing KPIs (key performance indicators) and OKRs (objectives and Key Results).

• The Cross-Quarter days are like the “mid-quarter” meetings with my boss to see if I was on track to meet my 90-day quarterly goals.

• Instead of having monthly goals that follow the Gregorian calendar, I have “moonly” goals. I set the goals on the new moon (just like the bigger quarterly goals I set on Solar events). I use full moons as a replacement for “mid-month check-ins” I used to have to do in my corporate job.

I still use a lot of corporate structure regarding my personal goals!

I will always have a part of me that thinks in structure and logic because I was entrenched in the corporate world for so long. But using the wheel of the year as a way to not only be structured but be connected with nature has been a GAME-CHANGER for me.

P.S. I will make myself a 2024 version of this for when my new year starts on the Winter Solstice on December 21, 2023. If you’d like a copy, feel free to let me know! I’ll share it in a newsletter closer to that Time!

Fiction-Corner

I don’t talk about my current novel in progress a lot. Still, I want to share interesting historical tidbits as I research the historical context behind my characters.

The novel is about the ancient nomadic tribes of Skythia (around the northern shores of the Black Sea in modern-day Ukraine and Russia). What makes these tribes—particularly the women in these tribes— so attractive to me is that they are the inspiration the Greeks used in their myths about the Amazon warrior women.

Modern-day Wonder Woman, to ancient Amazons like Penthesilea in the Iliad, derives from how Ancient Greeks viewed Skythian women.

One of the fires under my ass on why I want to write a novel from the perspective of these Skythian women is modern archeology. For so long, archeologists assumed any graves unearthed in the region with weapons belonged to male warriors. But DNA evidence and modern science show that isn’t always the case.

To learn more about these incredible people, you can check out this article from The Washington Post to get a taste…

Amazons were long considered a myth. These discoveries show warrior women were real.

But if you want to take a deeper dive, I recommend these books:

• The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World a book by Adrienne Mayor

• Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World a book by Anthony Sattin

Thanks for reading this month’s newsletter!

I’ll send these info-style newsletters about once a month, but you’ll still get Rewriting Myth goodness in your inbox!

Monica

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