January didn’t always mark the beginning of our calendars. In Roman culture, March represented the beginning of the year due to it’s great weather for planting season and marching for wars, hence the name. The Gregorian calendar we are familiar with changed the start of the year from March to January.
Janus is the Roman deity of beginnings, gates, thresholds, doorways, endings, etc. He was invoked and honored in all beginnings. We can see his ceremony and practice today with ribbon cuttings, proposals, baby showers, and New Year’s resolutions. Our shared celebration of beginnings is an important shared one, for we can all experience a passage and transition together.
Janus is represented with two faces, one looking into the past and one looking into the future. When we reflect upon the past, we use the term ruminate. When we learn about the future, we use the term illuminate. Janus was responsible for the beginning of wars and also the beginning of peace, the end of good times and the end of bad times.
He represented spatial changes as well, representing thresholds and barriers between worlds. Janus is with us when we are inviting guests into our homes, entering the thresholds of businesses, and saying goodbye for the last time. He is with us when we start a long journey, start a new endeavor, or meet someone for the first time.
There are retirement celebrations, funerals, sweet and bitter endings. It is romantic to dream about a different tomorrow and it is what gives us hope. But it is just as beautiful to get wrapped up in nostalgia and to appreciate all the journeys before us and before now. It’s beautiful we can document our lives so well, whether we mean to or not, with videos, images, stories. Sometimes you don’t know when the last time you’ll do something is: the last time you hang out with a friend, the last time you log into your once favorite game, the last time you see this particular town.
When I was raid leading everyday in World of Warcraft Vanilla Classic, I had a discord server with several hundred members. I had 3 rules.
Rules
1. Be kind to one another
2. Enjoy your time in Azeroth; it will be over before you know it
3. Invite your friends & have fun!
These were rules for a virtual community in an online game, but they really do apply to our real world as well.
I hope you all enjoyed 2022 and are looking forward to 2023!
I’ll end with the fortune I received yesterday from Panda Express.
Writing, Design, Poetry 