Remembering the Wheel

I made a zine!

I used to live in the city and I used to be a materialist. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. I can't entirely blame the metropolis. Church bells still toll the hours in London. The leaves change colour on the Plane trees. Sales of umbrellas increase as streetlights reflect off dark pavements at 4pm. But it is easier there to slip into a delusion of modernity, that the present is, well, all that’s present. That time is a perpetual series of units to be productively used for work–or respite from work. That there is no greater rhythm making sense of this fleeting, exhausting existence. But, of course, there is. And the only technology you need to tune into it is your attention.

All cultures, secular and religious, witness a liturgical year. Saints days commemorate the best of us and holidays call us to community or consumption. Unfortunately the modern liturgical calendar is a bit of a bodge. Where I live, we have some secularised Christian remnants fortified against sacred introspection, some national holidays (suspect and poorly attended) and days of remembrance only for those who witnessed the events first or second hand. This liturgy doesn't reveal anything to us about the world, except perhaps how uneasy we are in it. It just drones on in the background, white noise produced by a crotchety appliance, until it interrupts with a splutter that either distracts or inconveniences us.

I didn’t grow up Christian. The Christian festivals that sing and pray the story of Christ into being don’t speak to me. I love that they tell a story, and that they invite believers to deepen into that story year on year, but it’s not my story. I need something (forgive me friends, I know you’re good at it) a little less fanciful. It’s not all Christianity I struggle with, it’s just the claims to historicity and objectivity that I find tricky. I prefer my mythos subjectively encountered. So I’m called to honour a more basic narrative, an archetypal plot that can’t be unpicked by the pedantic fucker in my head. That story is the Wheel.

When I moved to the country I couldn’t ignore it any longer. Different stars in the sky, crops in the fields, fluctuations in my circadian rhythm. The seasons reveal a single story across multiple mediums: growth, death and rebirth. I like to think of it as: destroy, create, enjoy. But where it begins and ends is impossible to say; it turns. This is the liturgical calendar that emerges from seasonal change as we rotate through the solstices and equinoxes and the days in between. It’s so obvious to anyone paying attention that here in the northern hemisphere every culture and tradition has laid claim to the same dates (or near enough) to tell their own story. But no one owns the Wheel or any of its spokes. Whether you call it Christmas or Yule or Saturnalia we don’t all celebrate the Winter Solstice by coincidence. The solstice stands still in time and calls us to witness, on the eve of winter, the promise of new life. The rest - hymns, trees, feasting - is arabesque. This holy day is not constructed or even discovered; it reveals itself to us.

As I started paying deep attention–to the movement of the planet, to the traditions of my culture and to my own biorhythms–I found the same story in the heavens and the dirt. In folklore and in my menstrual tracking app. As above, so below. The Wheel isn’t just turning from winter to spring, it’s not just an ecosystem humming its tune. It’s a pattern that runs right through the axis mundi, like a stick of rock, all the way up to the moon. Everything that exists in time is subject to its turning: every breath, every thought, every project, every civilization, every species, every star. Beginning, middle and end. It’s more nuanced than that. Every story needs fleshing out a little, but the same basic structure undergirds everything. The eight holy days of the Wheel allow us to experience that deep magic. I’ve found that checking in on the world, my community and myself every six weeks or so and taking time to practice deep devotional attention to the Wheel’s turning transformed me. It made me more me. And, like it or not, there was no one else I was ever going to be, at least not convincingly. So I call that a win.

As part of my devotional attention I started recording my observations about the natural world, the folk customs I discovered and my own experiences on and around these holy days. But I can never just observe, I like to get my hands dirty, so naturally I found myself responding ritually to the Wheel. Participating in the turning in my own unorthodox way. Sensing a hunger for deeper connection I, somewhat apprehensively, shared these rituals with friends, coven and clients. My precious yet parochial practices resonated. Okay, so maybe not everyone wants to stay up all night on midsummer’s eve or work through their psycho-spiritual baggage at a halloween disco but the underlying themes spoke to them. They heard the hum. And that’s what I offer in this zine. My Book of Hours, my sacred text. No prescriptions. Just what I do and why I do it. Eight essays, eight rites. One turn of the Wheel, remembered in art, prose and ritual to give you the gist and inspire you to try it for yourself, paying attention that is, in whatever way makes sense to you.

But it’s not really about you, or me. I made this zine as an offering to the Wheel and an attempt at resistance to the desacralisation of modernity. It is in gratitude and defiance that I kneel to the Wheel, to this great pattern that no-one invented but everyone senses. This zine is my sacrament to the thing that is undeniably bigger than me which, in my own circumspect way, I regard as divine. To my home, and yours, if only you’d realise it.

I intended to create a 16 page booklet that I could staple myself and gift to a few friends, as you can see the project had a life of its own and has ended up as a 148 page professionally printed zine. If you buy it I’ll post it to you, there is no digital version. It’s $25 including post and packaging to wherever you are in the world from where I am, which is England. If you read it and especially if you try the rituals I’d love to hear from you, so please comment below or drop me an email (rebecca@rebeccaonpaper.com). I’ve only printed a hundred and can’t promise there will be any more so get it while you can.