Happy New Year 2012 - The Wheel

The Wheel: change.

This card is the "New Year" card in my mind. Others attach the idea of "fate" to the card, or the "wheel of fortune". Either way, these are topics at the front of our minds as we turn the calander to a new year.

It is a time where we long for a glimpse to the future, it is in our nature to want to know what the new year holds in store.

I'd like to focus more on the 'change' aspect of the card more than the 'fate' or future aspects. The change of year is purely artificial. It is roughly attuned to the change of season, which makes sense. In the circle of the year, in the four seasons, we need to pick a start/finish line...any one will do, and has, for one culture or another through our history. For some the year changes in the fall, at the harvest. For others, it is the spring...with the new births of animals and the planting of a new crop. Summer and winter do just as well. It is all arbitrary, an idea placed on Nature to let we humans work with nature and each other in a coordinated way. Nothing more. It is social convention, not magic. The power of the New Year comes from all of us putting our energy into it together. If there is change and magic in the coming of a new year, it is because we, together, in our culture, make it so.

Every day is a new day. Every day is a chance for change. New Year's Day is no different in that respect. No more and no less powerful than any other sunrise. It is all in how you welcome it, feel about it. Any day can be New Year's Day if you choose to make it so. It has everything to do with the way we recognize, accept, and adapt to change. Change in calendar, change in ourselves. It is inevitable. How you deal with change is an important, personal, spiritual journey. New Year's day celebrations are a reflection of that. Do we welcome the new year with hopes and high intentions or do we send away the old year with a 'good riddence' and nothing more than a caution to not let the door hit it on the way out.

I've felt both ways, depending on the desires of the year, the judgements I've hung on events big and small.

This year I think I'll welcome 2012...who knows what it will bring. The old year was a good/bad year, just like any other. Pick a day, any day, and follow the events for the year that follow it. There you find a mixed bag of events...the same as the melange found from Jan. 1 to Jan. 1.

Hope is as eternal as change. So I hope that the time between January 2012 and January 2013 is happy, hopeful, healthy, playful and prosperous for you all.