Every year I refine my astrology calendars, nudging them a little closer to the sky they’re meant to honor. This year, one change stands out like a bright star on a moonless night: the dial now turns counterclockwise and the months start in a brand-new place.
If you’ve used my calendars for years, you’ll notice the shift right away. January no longer sits at the top of the wheel marching clockwise. Instead, the new editions anchor themselves at the cardinal points of the year: solstices and equinoxes now occupy the four directions of the dial. January begins just to the right of the bottom center, and the entire year unfolds counterclockwise around the circle.
At first glance, it may feel like the wheel is spinning the “wrong” way. But this adjustment actually brings the calendar into deeper alignment with the sky itself.
Why counterclockwise?
In the northern hemisphere, the zodiac unfolds counterclockwise when you look up from Earth. The Moon completes its phases in that same direction. The planets wander along the ecliptic in that direction. The sky turns like a great cosmic carousel, always sweeping eastward.
Clockwise time, on the other hand, is a clever human invention rooted in shadow. The earliest clocks were sundials, and the shadow cast by the Sun moves clockwise across the dial. Our modern timekeeping inherited the shadow’s path, not the sky’s.
When I created the first version of this calendar back in 2012, I wrestled with this. Western culture reads circles in a clockwise direction almost automatically. But the more I studied the movement of the heavens, the more it felt like clockwise belonged to what I now call “shadow time.” The way time behaves when we track a shadow of darkness instead of a path of illuminating light. The new counterclockwise orientation returns the dial to the rhythm of the actual cosmos looking up instead of it's shady signature looking down in the opposite direction. It's inherently disconnecting us from nature if you think about it philosophically.
Re-centering the Four Gates of the Year
Placing the solstices and equinoxes at the four fixed directions feels like tuning the calendar to its true north. These four seasonal gateways are the backbone of the year and the architecture behind the zodiac itself. Grounding them at the compass points makes the wheel not just visually clearer but more intuitive, especially for people learning to read astrology charts or follow lunar cycles.
Now, as you move around the dial, the year unfolds in the same direction the Sun appears to travel along the ecliptic. The Moon’s cycles braid themselves neatly into this pattern. Everything interlocks with a kind of cosmic click.
A More Accurate Sky Map, A More Embodied Experience
This update isn’t only about accuracy. It’s also about embodiment. You’re not just looking at a calendar. You’re inhabiting it. When you trace your finger around the wheel, you’re following the arc of the heavens above you, not the path of a shadow on the ground. The dial no longer imitates a clock on a kitchen wall. It behaves like the sky itself. And that, to me, brings the magic back.
Thank You for Growing With This Calendar
Designing these calendars has always been a conversation between creativity, astronomy, symbolism, and intuition. Each edition becomes a little more refined, a little more attuned, a little more like the living sky it represents. There are a few other design tweaks: wavy lines where straight ones or hard corners once existed to reflect the flowing nature of the cosmic clock, redesign of the zodiac wheel & monthly markers for better legibility & the LunaSol features a howling wolf inside a full moon & the Statue of Liberty illuminated by the sun.
Thank you for using these calendars year after year, for sharing them, gifting them, and building rituals around them. I hope this new orientation helps you feel even more rooted in the turning of the seasons and the dance of the planets overhead.
Here’s to a year aligned with the living sky. ✨
In cosmic community,
Julie Wilder
