A Book of Days : Tracking the Seasons of the Spirit
By Victoria Pendragon
We’ve all had experiences that we’ll never forget for one reason or another, moments that shine like jewels. They might be experiences that were so filled with love or passion or force or terror that they quite literally changed who we are at some level, or they might be events that carried with them the power of nature making herself known in stunning fashion, or they might be moments of sheer transcendence, physical, mental or spiritual. These events, charged as they are, imprint on our cellular programming and stay with us, sometimes unconsciously, for the rest of our lives, causing similar events or stimuli to trigger either memories of the original happening or, when our programming has been subsumed by our waking consciousness, waves of seemingly unidentifiable emotion.
As human beings we are by nature creatures of habit. Any student of the ancient Five Element System, the basis for so many natural healing modalities, can display for you charts showing the activity levels of the organs of the body at specific times each day. Our bodies are, in a sense, intrinsically programmed. This is a significant part of what causes jet lag. Every creature in nature is programmed in its own way in relation to its own environment. The sun and the moon and the planets and the stars keep to a schedule. These patterns, overlaid and interwoven, account for the balanced beauty to be found in life and in nature, they form the setting for the experiential jewels of our lives…but those experiences, though they may seem quite random to you, just might have a sequence of their own, a pattern so vast that it tends to go unnoticed.
Our experience of the functions of our bodies is a daily event for us, as are the movements of our more local celestial bodies. The moons phases and its effects on us are so regular that tide charts can be projected out decades in advance; prior to the introduction of artificial lighting every woman could count on knowing exactly when her menses would flow. Thanks to science, we are now aware of many patterns we’d never have known about in the worlds of astronomy and wildlife, even in the microscopic worlds inside us. As our technological abilities have advanced, so too has our ability to observe these intricate orders and it begins to seem as if there are patterns inside patterns inside patterns possibly endlessly. All of these are patterns that science, over centuries, has evolved to explore, but what of the peak experiences brought to us from the spirit level of our being: the moments of sublime joy and ineffable sorrow, the births and deaths and quintessential dreams? Might these too be part of a larger picture that we simply cannot see because we have not had the apparatus needed to observe them?
