Why now?

 "What New Year?" a young friend said with surprising pique when I asked how he and his wife planned to celebrate.  "There's a New Year all the time: Chinese and Tibetan, our Nepali and your Western, Vietnamese, different ones in India... ."   

I guess that's why Buddhists insist on now.  Human timing is such a mess, New Year is all over the place: January 1, March 21, the first day of the 7th lunar month, the first new moon in Aquarius, you name it. India has a whole pile of New Year's from Gujarati in October to Bengali in mid April. 

I look at this calendar confusion, see how clueless we are and realize we are just making this stuff up. Frankly, nobody really knows where a year begins. Where do you pinpoint the start of a circle? It's been said that early Hebrew rabbis argued endlessly over whether the life cycle starts anew when a seed is planted or when it is harvested. Same difference in the way Westerners and Tibetans tally human age: we start at birth, but they start from conception so that a Tibetan exiting the birth canal is already one-year-old. So even our birthday calculations are iffy.

The rabbis eventually settled their debate by having it both ways.  Rosh Hashonah, which literally translates as "head of the year", comes at harvest time, because that moment started renewal of the land for new crops. But Rosh Hashonah turns out to be the first day of the seventh month. The first day of the first month coincides with spring planting. It's just doesn't get the same respect.

Perhaps those rabbis wanted to say the spiritual renews itself apart from the physical--and is maybe more worth celebrating. Perhaps they were just cannily trying to stand apart to stand out from the sameness of their neighbors who celebrated in spring. Or maybe they were just picking a time--after all the farm work was finally done-- they figured people would show up to pray. In spring, folks were too busy.

Defenders of this double whammy like to say we're guilty of the same double standard. They point to our culture whose calendar year begins in January although fiscal years often start in July. They talk about school years starting in September, the ninth month. Calendar perspective, they will tell you, hinges on what's to be counted and why.

It also hinges on what we use for an abacus. Do we count a year by the go-rounds of moons, or the Earth going around the sun?  Obviously the changing phases of the moon make it easier to track than Earth spinning around a constant sun.This seems as good a reason as any why so many years and New Year's are... well... lunar. 

Still, there is no clarity about where a moon year starts. The Chinese think it begins on the new moon between January 21 and February 20. That happens to be the exact sun sign period we call Aquarius. It also happens to be two new moons after the winter equinox, a solar happening. Apparently this particular time signals the beginning of  planting season. 

Some in India think the new year and planting season comes one moon later, on the new moon between March 15 and April 15. In Sri Lanka and Thailand, where New Year is called Songkram, it's our April 14-15 continuously. But in Gujarat, India and all of Nepal, New Year called Diwali comes in October, on the first new moon after the autumn equinox. It's about light decreasing which feels like the past has been extinguished.

Muslim residents of all these countries and plenty more have their own lunar New Year, a new moon day that migrates around other calendars because Muslims only count 354 days to a year.  Vietnamese Tet is always calculated in the short time between harvest and new planting. The Greek Orthodox fixed their New Year firmly on what we call January 1 only because that's the day they centuries ago calculated that their patron, Saint Basil, passed into heaven. In Ethiopia, it's September 11-12, onset of autumn weather.

Persian New Year, Nowruz, is solar powered, and falls always on the spring equinox, March 21. That's when light increases, planting starts and spring fever revs the blood. In theory anyway. Nowruz coincides with the start of the ancient Greek astrological sun sign year, that one whose months are Aries, Taurus, Pisces et al.

Other Middle Eastern New Years adhere to the ancient Babylonian tradition of saying the year begins on the first new moon after the spring equinox. This puts it in the sun sign that kicks off the astrological year, Aries the ram. And as it happens, Jews who don't celebrate their new year here but wait until the seventh lunar month blow a ram's horn at that later date.

What's even more dizzying is that our own, familiar New Year, January 1, is probably the most unhinged from any astrological or agricultural realty, which is to say from the real world. Maybe if it coincided with the winter solstice which signifies not only the darkest time of year but the moment light returns, it would make sense. But it doesn't coincide...with anything. It seems totally made up, as arbitrary as Thanksgiving, which used to be a valid harvest holiday in October. Those cranberries, that squash and the turkey make sense for that moment, but during the Depression Thanksgiving was moved by fiat to the fourth Thursday in November to launch Christmas shopping season. Ka-ching.

As best as I can tell-- because I wasn't there so it's all hearsay-- the Romans had ten months somehow divided into 304 days--I can't do that math for beans--and found themselves a bit shortchanged when Earth went around the sun. So Julius Caesar convened the best mathematical and astrological minds of his kingdom and they came up with a twelve month, 365 day scheme. They planned to keep their calendar hinged, as their old one had been, to the ancient Babylonian still in vogue elsewhere, where the year started on March 21. But apparently someone pointed out that the month of January had been named for Janus, the god of gates and doors and thus of new beginnings, so why not start there? First of January, New Year. And now we drop the ball, so to speak.

So a word to those who still feel shame on not having a date to celebrate or noisemakers to blow. This whole New Year's Eve thing really is a great way to understand the essence of emptiness. There is no there there when you examine it closely. Last night was a perfectly ordinary, just another night. We invested it with a big deal. But what somebody else thinks is New Year, just an ordinary night to us, will be coming soon.










~Sandy Garson "Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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