The round year is an ideal that got lost in our modern experience of time, but which is so deeply embedded in old spiritual systems, it often goes unquestioned. 

People attuned to the cycles of nature, who spend a lot of their life outdoors, have a deep instinct about this way of experiencing time, and feel its truth to the core of their being, because they are closer to its patterns and can’t help seeing them repeating. 

Keeping a nature journal especially helps one see how precise the changes of the seasons are, worthy of the most sophisticated clockwork in existence.

The movements of the planets and stars create exquisite embroideries in the night sky, completing and restarting themselves with delicate precision, and if you have any idle time, I recommend taking the look at the petals of Venus, one of the most beautiful planetary orbits you will ever gaze upon.

The symbolic year is one such circle, and it fits neatly inside our lifespan, with enough repeats to allow us to understand its dance.

What is it like living the round year?

There is Spring, then Summer, then Fall, then Winter, and then it’s Spring again. The patterns of the Year begin anew: the first daffodil, the first thunderstorm, the first falling leaf, the first snow.

We used to represent this way of experiencing time in spiritual calendars, which distill events that took place over centuries and place them in the confines of a single year. 

Those events, natural or social, live in perpetuity, linked vertically through history to make their present and their past become one. 

They introduce certainty, or as close as we can get to it, into a future which presents itself as random, although that is our experience of it, and not its nature.

Easter, the fall equinox, that elusive day at the beginning of February which marks the halfway point through the winter, they are not dates on a calendar, they’re familiar stations on a circular journey, experiential markers out of time.

No matter how long we have been on this earth, we always perceive them the same. They give us access, albeit below the threshold of reason, to the real workings of universal time and the meaning of eternity.

The contemplation of eternal cycles brings peace, wisdom, and patience. 

It helps us get off the treadmill of daily worries (oh, what an ironic thought that is in this context), and places us at the larger scale of repeating patterns, ascending and descending trends and seasons.

We’re nothing but a bunch of cells, anyway, organized in collections of fractal structures of unfathomable complexity which develop through time and lifecycles, live, die and replace themselves while we keep on living unaware of their workings, which maintain our earthly bodies’ recognizable form for as long as we draw breath. 

We do not have lives, we are life arrays.

That is extraordinary enough to make all life and reality sacred.

In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?

1. The symbolic year is an ideal we live in perpetuity, a blueprint of sorts, for all the passing years we count on the calendar. 
2. We perceive time as a directional arrow, but reality runs in circles. 
3. The yearly cycle fits neatly inside our lifespans, with enough repeats to allow us to understand it.
4. Placing meaningful stations inside the round year helps us predict future events.
5. Everything begins, ends and begins again.
6. Whatever you perceive as brand new probably happened before in strikingly similar fashion.
7. Contemplating round time brings patience, peace and wisdom and places us at the larger scale of repeating patterns, trends, and seasons.
8. Our lives are not rigid intervals on an endless timeline. 
9. We’re interconnected overlapping ecosystems of cells, all different, each with its own design, lifespan, and replacement cycle, which work in concert to maintain the cohesion and logic of the whole.
10. We don’t have lives, we are life arrays.