Welcome to 2023!
New Year's Day brings us a welcomed chance for a clean slate, a new beginning in whatever aspect of life we choose to emphasize. Traditionally, we let go of the old before we claim the new. Hence, yesterday brought many people some encounter and review of 2022 and years past. What strikes me this year is: The power of the New Year Holiday as a global consensus on the space to begin again. The holiday itself shows the power of consciousness.
While known history dates some type of New Year celebration to as early as 4,000 years ago, it's more than likely festivals and religious rites of "starting over" came into being long before that. Early cultures tracked the natural cycles of the seasons, patterns of weather, plant growth and animal behavior, the apparent movement of the constellations, even the daily cycles of light and dark--day and night--that gave rise to the idea of new and renewed life as the way of things. This awareness in turn blended with concepts of prayer and offerings to a larger source of control of such cycles, since humans had little control. Over centuries of tradition, discovery, war and destruction, scientific, philosophical, spiritual and religious experience, human awareness of the cycles of life and human behavior produced New Year's Eve and New Year's Day as a universal archetype. Some cultures still celebrate and draw their traditional festivals from the lunar calendar and as such have other dates for a New Year, but modern commerce and global business across cultures have added recognition of the western calendar with January 1 as the starting the point of the global New Year.
Consider this agreement as a collective creation of human consciousness. History details the political and religious wrangling and the powerful rulers who had their decrees on the making of calendars at different times. It was only in the 20th Century that global business brought our current calendar to the global forefront. Still, whatever the date, the idea of "starting over" remains a human construct that gives emotional power to a specific piece of time where we can let go, regroup, review, and begin anew--each to their own physical, emotional, mental and spiritual capacity. There is a power in a collective archetype. What other possibilities, new global agreements, world-wide consensus, can we agree on and gift our world? As you contemplate your New Year, consider a personal resolution to be a positive part of an evolving collective consciousness. Happy New Year! (Susan Nettleton)
for a New Year's poem/prayer by Larry Morris, follow the link: https://hillsidesource.com/spiritual-launchpad