Hello friend, my name is Julie Wilder and this is my beautiful daughter, Maya. She is the inspiration for this line of calendars. When she was three years old, she started to learn about the days of the week at Montessori school and something inside me just went - UG. I wanted her to stay in no-time, where one day bled into the next and the passage of moments was marked by meals and goodnight snuggles, holiday traditions and planting seeds in the garden. My wild & free self-longed for this, while my pragmatic self-understood this was, obviously, impossible - short of moving outside of civilization itself.So I settled for making a wheel of the week, color coded like the rainbow to show my mini-me, that time does not come in a line, as our calendar would suggest, but is a wheel that moves in cycles, repeating over and over again. We did not write the alphabetical symbols on the calendar, we just referenced Monday was red day, Tuesday was orange day and on and on. She accepted this explanation so simply, and I began to reflect about the myths I had discovered about time and the ancient methods I've come to study since.
When I discovered the way the Gregorian calendar came to be, I had an incredibly profound awakening. If something as fundamental as time itself was being misconstrued, what other information so impactful to EVERYTHING was also not quite right? As I researched, I understand that this calendar, adopted by so many cultures, shifts people away from nature's rhythms, creating chaos. Our strange discomfort that something is off hardly ever gets identified because hardly anyone questions a universally recognized system.
The Julian calendar (on which the Gregorian calendar is based), was imposed by Roman Emperors (and later Catholic Popes) and literally & intentionally, moved entire cultures out of synchronization with nature while turning time into a one-dimensional line instead of the multi-dimensional experience of being unified harmonically with All That Is. The modern-day calendar, profoundly and fundamentally, keeps us disconnected from nature herself. The advent of digital devices is further serving to erase the round clock, with its elegant gliding hands, to numbers on a screen. Many cultures still use a lunar or lunisolar calendar, however, the Gregorian has become the international standard for civil purposes.
As I gazed at the little rainbow wheel Maya and I had crafted to represent the week, I realized time, well, it was on my mind. We had just entered the much-hyped year of 2012, renewing my fascination with the advanced Mayan method of observing the cycles of time. I began to wonder how to teach Maya about time while integrating my understanding of moon cycles & solar seasons, as well as the other planets. Our little rainbow wheel was still beckoning me, and I was seized with an intuition that chakra energy must also correlate somehow to time. In fact, I discovered (with a quick google search) there is an entire ancient body of knowledge dedicated to chakras & time called Kalachakra.
And so, I went to sleep that night, pregnant with ideas, knowing I had to create a calendar that would be an open invitation, the first step from Gregorian, or Father Time, to understanding cyclical time filled with energetic influences. We needed a bridge toward a new relationship and experience where Father Time could walk with Mother Time for a while. I awoke on the Spring Equinox of 2012 with images flashing through my mind. A rough draft wireframe was channeled through into Adobe Illustrator in late night binge sessions. I laid the design away until just before the much prophesied Winter Solstice was practically upon us. In another three-day session, I again felt called to birth this calendar into being. She was printed for the very first time on the morning of the Winter Solstice, December 21st, 2012 and blessed in a ceremony that evening.
I'm excited to begin sharing through this website more information on the cycles of time and my personal experience shifting back into sync with nature, as much as possible in a culture so oriented toward the Gregorian. Learn more about the civil calendar and natural cycles through Spiral Spectrum's Synchronic System.
This just one of many projects I am involved in. To discover my other dimensions, visit http:/juliebewilder.com and support Maya's early dip into entrepreneurism at her Etsy shop: http://etsy.com/shop/jumpinjunipershop
