The Winter Moon: Lesser Cycles Make Greater Cycles Easier

If you have just felt the pressure to make Christmas and New Year’s feel especially meaningful (and perhaps, felt the pang of disappointment once both these were over and everyday life reasserted itself), realize that part of that is an artifact of advertising, pushing the seasons into hype. The other part of it is the loss of “lesser cycles” in most everyday life — and you can reconnect with those. Doing so will bring you greater satisfaction, joy, and achievement as you flow with the wheel of the year. The more lesser cycles you dial in to, the more you can relax around the “greater cycles” of the great holidays, and really enjoy them as connecting with yourself, your friends, and your family.

The weeks and the months are the two cycles that are in most people’s awareness as they are connected with daily work. We all know the excitement (or trepidation) of Mondays, the relief of Fridays as the week self-renews. Adding to that, there is the relief of closing out an old month, or the burst of energy inherent in the start of a new one. Each of these is part of an energy cycle that you know how to use.

However, there are many more cycles of the year that can begin to enhance your experience of creation, fulfillment, celebration, and curation (i.e. discarding the old) throughout the entire year. The more you tune in to these, the more you can understand that the year has cycles and celebratory experiences throughout, and this makes the "great holidays" fit more easily into what can be seen as a much greater whole.

Many Cycles Mean Much Wisdom

One cycle you can easily follow is that of the moon. The moon's waxing and waning is a richly nuanced, ancient cycle of experience. It is one with which your ancestors were intimately familiar, and this alone can give your spirit some healing reconnection with nature. Tuning into what the moon's doing each day can help you work with your best abilities to function, achieve, and create. Learn when the moon waxes and wanes, when it rises and sets, even when it reaches meridian in the sky. You can then review how you yourself feel during these various cycles for greater insights. To know the details, search online for moon resources and rising/setting times, and begin to see how your own energies flow and ebb in conjunction.

Another cyclical experience is to truly dial into and feel the seasons. Find out when the solstices are, as well as the equinoxes. Then, keep a journal to follow your own inner energy as it rises and falls in conjunction with the rising of the year (Winter to Summer Solstice) and withdrawing of the year (Summer to Winter Solstice). You may well find that the many themes and activities of your life coincide with these larger metacycles, and with the distinct seasonal energies of winter, spring, summer, autumn. Take time to recognize them as milestones throughout the year.

Cycles As Antidote To The Linear

Dialing into these many interconnected cycles will give you an idea of the complex energies you’re working within as a human being. This is a good antidote to a particularly modern ideal which causes a great deal of struggle and non-achievement, i.e. the opposite of cycles -- the idea of purely linear growth, always constant, always increasing.

Linear growth is an artifact of the industrial era, of the transition from human-paced cottage craft into factory mills that could be run ceaselessly, all day long, day in and day out. As humans adapted to tend the machines, the idea translated into a human cognate, that man is a machine that can be run hard and fast, ceaselessly, day in and day out, like a machine stamping widgets, who should be giving perfect performance at all times.

But that’s not how it works. Human energy is cyclical in its growth - forward, growing, backward, receding, then growing again. Understanding that helps you work with your achievement energies more wisely.

The more smaller cycles and inter-year celebrations you can realize, the more you can appreciate the “greater holidays” with peace. They no longer have to be the “once a year mega-blowouts” they are often cast as — and just as often ending up as frenzied, aching attempts to cram a year’s enjoyment into two holidays. Instead, see them as rewards for a year well lived, each in its turn as preparation for a new cycle of thriving achievement that runs throughout the year.

Relax. In each year, you have many cycles of up and down, beginning and ending, growth and change. Flow with the wheel of the year, and enjoy.

Keep Growing,