Here's an excerpt from an article I wrote as part of a series on the Mayan Calendar and living on natural time. If you'd like the longer piece as a Word doc, please email me.
In high school English I learned a 64-carat word for a common ailment: triskaidekaphobia, "fear of the number thirteen." The elevator in my grandparents' apartment building omitted the thirteenth floor. I also recall a series of horror movies with "Friday the 13th" in the title.
A society steeped in superstition and consumerism finds it easy to assign anxiety to anything that threatens the status quo. Thirteen is the number of movement, of change—a wild card—and that can be very scary. If we feel divorced from our origins, terrified of our own power, we profane the sacred: thirteen becomes unlucky, symbolic scapegoat of all we're afraid to embrace.
When we can take the thirteenth step, however, we're on the first step of the Stairway to Heaven. With the courage to look, we find thirteen stitched into the very fabric of our culture. Thirteen colonies gave birth to a nation. Cross-culturally, the thirteenth year signifies a coming-of-age. In the Jewish religion, a Bar Mitzvah ceremony at thirteen marks a boy's entrance into manhood. Girls generally begin to menstruate at thirteen, an embodied initiation.
Thirteen, then, is a fundamental Earth rhythm, biorhythm. To reject thirteen is, perhaps, to reject some core aspect of ourselves as human beings.
We can heal this perceived split by reclaiming our native knowing. One way that resonates for me is following a Thirteen-Moon Calendar, woven together with the Mayan Sacred Tzol'kin. The Thirteen Moon Calendar shows us a path to walk to restore right relationship in our lives, to re-member (make membership again) our journey as one family of origin. Based on an annual solar cycle of 13 moons (months) of 28 days each (the feminine cycle), this calendar is synchronized with nature and human biology. It's expansive, intuitive, juicy, flowing: life, in all its harmonious chaos. The beauty of this apparent paradox lies in learning to honor the both/and: life is orderly and messy, spiritual and material. Living in tune with these innate contradictions, we breathe in our own magnificence, and feel nourished and held in the body of the Great Mother.
Our Gregorian calendar, by contrast, models scarcity, so we always subtly feel like we're starving: if you get what you need, there might not be enough for me. Living a compressed, alienating existence, our spiritual lungs squeezed for air, we evince these invisible shackles in the time-is-money, me-first, bigger-better-best credos of mechanistic time. Pursued by the clock, we've forgotten that time is creativity, that women carry time in their bodies, and have accepted the clock as king. José Argüelles, author of The Mayan Factor, who deciphered the evolutionary course correction embedded in the Mayan mathematical codes, calls false time "Satan's last curse." One awakening soul, hearing this, suggested to Argüelles that the first twelve moons of the Thirteen-Moon Calendar are like the twelve disciples of Christ, and the thirteenth moon is Christ himself. This has nothing to do with religious dogma or superstition; it is the timbre of Truth: by following the Thirteen-Moon and Mayan Calendars, returning to true time and the ever-evolving, life-giving essence of the natural world, we all get to participate in the Christ principle.
As our collective mindfield moves from mindless fear to aware acceptance of thirteen as the sacred number of transformation and growth, a metamorphosis occurs. Metamorphosis means going beyond what existed before. Rumi said, "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there's a field; I'll meet you there." In this quantum field we midwife moth into butterfly. Scared into sacred. Each of us into our true purpose and potential.
What is this time of great transmutation helping you bring to birth? Whatever it is, may it be in beauty, for the greater good of all. Blessed Be!
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