Solstice, cycles, and the Mayan calendar

Friday was Solstice, the shortest, darkest day of the year. And it was simultaneously the moment when the days started getting longer, when the light began to return. It’s easy to understand how rituals grew up around this time of year. For weeks, even months, it seemed like the sun was leaving, dropping out of the sky to the south. How could we, being creatures who cherish and depend on light, not celebrate when it seemed to have changed its mind and started climbing back up the sky?

Not surprisingly, virtually every civilization has marked this moment in some way. Around the world, ancient calendars and other forms of time keeping showed some awareness of this change in the cycle of the days. Southwestern US Indians built structures that were perfectly aligned to this date, and, as we learned from endless coverage this year, the Mayans recognized 12-21-2012, Friday’s Solstice, as a key moment in their calendar.

I’m sure you all heard about the (supposed) Mayan prophecy that the world would end on 12-21-2012. This “prediction” became an excuse for end-of-the-world parties (including among high school kids, as I learned from the local filling station attendant, who had waited on several groups of such drunken revelers). And, as a website dedicated to this prophecy informed us, it also inspired thousands of people to flock to a mountain in France that was supposed to open up, revealing a space ship piloted by aliens that would take people away at the end of the world. Some folks traveled to an alternative safe place in Turkey.

Experts in Mayan culture, on the other hand, tell us that the Mayan calendar does not predict the end of the world. It predicts a new beginning.

The Mayan calendar is actually very complex. It’s based on several nested cycles, one within another, going back to the mythical beginning of the world, about 4111 B.C.E. on our calendar. One of these cycles is about 360 days long, similar to our year; another is about 52 years long, roughly a generation. And then there’s the “long count” calendar, which chronicles a cycle about 3000 years long. This is the calendar said to promise the end of the world. The long count does indeed mark 12-21-2012 as a special day—the transition from the first long-count cycle to the second. (Interestingly, after the fact, the website devoted to the end of the world now describes the day as a transition instead.) The next such transition will occur in about 4772 C.E., so it’s pretty safe to say we won’t be here for it.

Part of the discussion about the end of the world was the suggestion that the prophecy actually predicted the end of the world as we know it. This interpretation was favored in part, I imagine, because there’s a song to fit. In part because when it comes to the end of the world, the phrase “as we know it” is easier to swallow than the word “forever.” Perhaps in part because in some sense, every year, every day, every minute is the end of the world as we know it. No moment is ever precisely like any moment before it—if only because this moment is already a part of my past by the time the next one arrives. And in part because some people had somehow learned a more accurate interpretation of the Mayan calendar that recognizes this concept of ongoing cycles and renewal.

The Mayan calendar and our misunderstanding of it tells us something about ourselves. About how easily we accept misinterpretations of other cultures’ beliefs and artifacts, interpretations that obscure the wisdom those beliefs carry in favor of drama. About how easily we accept misunderstandings “sold” by folks who know how to market crises. But also, if we can step back from the hype, there’s something about the common threads that connect cultures and belief systems within cultures. And the threads that connect those beliefs with the world we all inhabit.

Like this notion of cycles. Solstice, the return of the light celebrated in some form across the centuries and across cultures, is at once the end and the beginning of a solar “year.” The Mayan calendar marks the end of a long count cycles and simultaneously the beginning of another. Cycles are like that. Life is like that. I often think of life as a sort of treadmill, with each generation fading into the one before and the one after. One generation slips off the front end, but the treadmill is never empty. There isn’t even a gap in the flow of generations because the generations flow into one another, each is both one generation and the next. Just as Solstice is simultaneously an ending, a transition, and a beginning.

We had a Solstice gathering on Friday night with a group of friends. We lit a lot of candles and dimmed the electric lights. We shared poems, writings, music, and personal experiences that spoke of darkness, light, and renewal. We talked (and talked and talked) about all kinds of things—about community and religion, about finding “light” in oneself, inspiration in music, hope in love, and comfort in the promise of home. About the “resurrection” that comes from the meaning and hope we leave behind us as we pass. And we talked about life and death. About the painful loss of beloved pets and dear friends, and about the new  baby recently born to other friends. We even talked about the Mayan calendar and its message of renewal. Without, I think, ever mentioning “cycles” per se, we talked about the cycles of our lives and of “life” beyond our lives.

Western cultures are so enamored of the notion of the self-contained individual. I wonder what we miss by thinking of ourselves in this isolated way. It’s true that if I focus on my self, I can identify a beginning and an end. But if I focus on cycles and on communities, then that demarcation disappears. Sure, beyond a certain point, my self-contained individual self won’t be here to witness the continuation of these nested cycles or the ongoing life of these communities. I’ll have stepped off the end of the treadmill.

But the Mayans had it right, I think: seen from the perspective of 3000 years, the moments that seem like endings are simultaneously beginnings, transitions. And there is no end to that.