The Pagan Calendar: Living the Wheel of Becoming
The Pagan Calendar - rooted in old European wisdom - maps the rhythm of light, shadow, and becoming, guiding us to live in balance with the turning Earth.
The Earth is a living being. Seasons are her breath, and people once learned to move with that breath - carving stones to catch the sun, tending fires at the thresholds. The European Pagan Calendar grew from that practice. Across cultures, elders remind us that time is a relationship—spiraling, renewing, oriented by memory and kinship—more like a conversation than a clock.
The wheel that never stops turning
I name this a European wheel, held alongside other peoples’ ways of keeping sacred cycles - each a local language for the same living pattern. Indigenous scholars like Robin Wall Kimmerer, Tyson Yunkaporta, and the Māori concept ka mua, ka muri all speak to this truth: that creation is never finished, that every turning is a remembering.
Each season on this Wheel carries its own lesson and flavor, a way of being that lives in the Land and in the body. The Pagan Calendar is a living memory of right relationship with time - a time that breathes, nourishes, and restores balance.
To live by this rhythm is to remember what our ancestors knew: the same pulse turning the seasons moves through our bones. The garden of the world and the garden of the self are the same.
When the Wheel found me in a small German village
I didn’t set out to live by the Wheel of the Year. It happened quietly, almost by accident, after I moved to Germany at the age of 19. The older rhythms still lived close to the surface there, not in a romantic way, but woven into daily life. People still marked time by long-held traditions. My doctor prescribed herbal tea for my headaches and massage for my backaches—ideas I had never encountered growing up in the United States. Even that slight shift began to change something in me.
In those first ten years in Ostwestfalen, the Land itself began teaching me. The scent of hay drying in meadows, the hush before snow, the slow greening of spring fields - all of it worked its way into my body’s internal clock. I was fascinated by the small local celebrations that marked the turning points of the year - festivals at harvest, bonfires in spring, candles placed on graves, and lanterns carried through the dark of winter. I had never known these as anything more than folklore, yet here they were, quietly shaping the rhythm of communal life. Participating in them, even as an observer, changed me. I began to feel time differently - not as a straight line, but as breath, an inhale and exhale of light.
In the spring of 1995, the veils tore open for me. My senses were flooded - spirit, sound, and shadow overlapping until I could hardly tell where one world ended and another began. I was living between realities, raw and overstimulated, unable to sleep more than a few hours a night. A few months later, I was introduced to the practice of tracking the moon and what my teacher called “right times.” That simple rhythm tethered me back to life. It gave my sensitivity something to lean against, a way to belong again to the body and the Land.
My learning moved backward. I was first taught to notice - to feel the signs through the body and the Land before I ever looked at a chart. I paid attention to how foods affected me, how I slept, how my moods shifted. I learned when to do laundry, when to clean windows, when to plant flowers, tomatoes, potatoes, or greens - all according to the moon’s sign and the turning of the seasons.
The practice was simple but radical: experience first, then observe. Each evening I’d look back and see what sign the moon had been in that day, tracing how its movement echoed through my body and the world around me. Over time, patterns revealed themselves. The Wheel began to live in me through the daily conversation between my body, the moon, and the Land, not through belief or study.
Why the Pagan Calendar still matters in modern life
The Pagan Calendar, often called the Wheel of the Year, comes from the old European lands—Celtic, Slavic, Norse, Germanic, and other earth-honoring peoples who read the Sun’s arc and the Earth’s turning as a living language of relationship. They didn’t stand outside it, taking notes. They lived within its rhythm, shaping their days and ceremonies to echo what the world was already doing. Their festivals marked the breathing points of the year - the subtle turns of light and season through which life remembers how to renew itself.
When I speak of the Pagan Calendar, I’m speaking from within that lineage, the one many of us inherited through our bloodlines or geography. And yet, the deeper truth is that humans everywhere have remembered the sacred nature of time. Tyson Yunkaporta writes of pattern-thinking and kinship among his Aboriginal people. Robin Wall Kimmerer calls it the grammar of animacy, the living language between beings. David Abram describes it as the reciprocity between body and world.
In this age of acceleration, the body often loses its sense of season. We rush through endings, skip the dark, and forget to let the ground rest. Acknowledging the Pagan Calendar brings us back to the wider rhythm that never stopped. It shows us how to be human at the pace of Earth and Sky, to feel the quiet intelligence that holds everything together.
When we return to that rhythm, time becomes less of a schedule and more of a conversation. Each turn of the Wheel speaks, and if we listen, we find ourselves once again in step with the world that made us.
The Wheel of the Year as a living map of becoming
The Wheel of the Year is a garden of time. Each festival, each turning, stirs a different current of life through the body and the land. When we live by this rhythm, we begin to notice that growth, rest, and renewal aren’t choices we make; they are patterns that breathe us.
In the old European world, eight festivals marked these shifts - four solar points and four cross-quarter days. Together, they form a map of becoming, tracing how life awakens, flowers, ripens, and returns to seed.
At the Winter Solstice, when light reaches its furthest edge, we enter the fertile void where new beginnings are conceived. The Wise Ones among our ancient ancestors called this the time of dreaming, when the Soul Star seeds - the deep potentials of life - begin to stir beneath the frozen ground.
Imbolc, the first whisper of spring, carries the innocence of returning light. It asks us to remember what the heart truly wants and to prepare the inner soil for what will grow.
The Spring Equinox brings the balance of day and night. It steadies us between effort and ease, calling the formless into form.
By Beltane, life leaps. Fire, fertility, and joy move through everything. The senses wake, reminding us that embodiment itself is sacred.
At Summer Solstice, the sun stands tall. This is the season of radiance, of offering what has ripened through our labor and love.
Lammas, the first harvest, invites appreciation and discipline - the tending that keeps abundance from turning to excess.
At the Autumn Equinox, the scales tip again toward night. We meet our ancestors in the harvest and learn that grief is not an ending, but a form of belonging.
And when Samhain arrives, the veil thins. The living and the dead share one breath. This is the descent, the sacred composting of all that has been, preparing the ground for another cycle of life.
The Pagan Calendar holds all of this - birth, growth, fruition, decline, and decay - as one continuous movement. It teaches that every threshold is both an arrival and a departure. The garden never stops becoming; it simply changes form.
Rewild Yourself offers the living foundation for embodying these rhythms in daily life, helping the body remember its place inside the turning of the seasons.
The incarnation process: Soul Seeds and seasons of life
At birth, we arrive with our own small field already planted. There are Wise Ones who say the Soul Star anchors through the heart and releases 108 seeds into the belly - potentials that will quicken as life unfolds. These seeds are not ideas or talents; they are living aspects of the soul waiting for the right conditions to emerge.
The Pagan Calendar provides those conditions. Each season warms a different set of seeds awake. Winter teaches rest and trust in the unseen. Spring calls courage and curiosity. Summer ripens generosity and expression. Autumn gathers discernment and appreciation. The rhythm of the year becomes the rhythm of incarnation - an endless dialogue between light and dark, expansion and return.
Mircea Eliade once wrote that sacred time is not a memory of beginnings but a continual renewal of creation. Every festival, every season, is a return to that first moment when spirit entered matter. When we live by this rhythm, incarnation stops feeling like a single event and begins to feel like an ongoing conversation. The soul doesn’t drop into the body once and for all; it keeps arriving through sensation, relationship, and the steady work of tending what has already taken root.
Each breath, each season, each loss and renewal is part of the same long act of becoming. The body is the soil where spirit learns to bloom.
The human task: tending the balance and becoming Thresholders
Every peoples has a story about why humans were placed here. The old European creation stories say our work was to tend the balance between light and dark, earth and sky, life and death. That tending is not a posture of neutrality; it is the art of creation itself.
Thresholders - those who live between worlds - remember this art in their bones. They are the dusk and the dawn made flesh, the living edge where what was and what is becoming touch. When they are grounded in Land and lineage, they become tenders- and vessels - through which life reorganizes itself. They hold both the ache of collapse and the glimmer of what wants to be born.
To inhabit the threshold is to stand inside the tension that most avoid. It asks for a nervous system that can stay open while the old dissolves and the new has not yet taken form. That steadiness - called capacity - is the foundation for true co-creation. Without it, we repeat the past; with it, we participate in evolution.
Carol Sanford calls this work “regenerative,” describing it as a living process that restores creative balance instead of perpetuating systems of extraction and denial. In the Nordic stories, creation begins in the mist rising between fire and ice - the meeting of opposites generating life. That mist still rises through us. When we can hold contradiction without collapsing into fear or control, something original emerges through our middle line.
This is the role of the Thresholder in our time: to stay awake in the in-between, to see clearly what is, to orient toward what we love, and to cultivate the capacity to hold the whole. From that place, destiny is not imposed or manifested; it unfolds.
Rewild Yourself is where this ground is built - the place where nervous system, spirit, and Land learn again to move as one living system.
Listening for the turning: reflection questions to walk with
When you live by the Pagan Calendar, reflection stops being a mental exercise and becomes a seasonal one. The Wheel turns, and with each turn, a question ripens in its soil.
Each threshold invites curiosity - a quiet wondering that listens more than it asks, that leans toward what wants to be known.
As you read, notice which one lingers in your body.
1. Where in your life are you standing at a threshold - the place where one thing has ended and another has not yet begun?
2. What sensations rise in you when you try to stay present in that in-between?
3. Which parts of you are asking for rest?
4. What would it mean, this season, to live as a co-creator rather than a reactor - to shape what’s emerging instead of repeating what has been?
5. How might you honor your own garden of soul seeds - tending what is already alive, rather than forcing what is not yet ready to grow?
These inquiries are not problems waiting for solutions. They are companions for the long path, evolving with each season of your becoming.
If you’d like a simple way to stay in conversation with these questions, the Come Home to Your Body ritual offers a gentle daily rhythm for listening through the body. Each sip, each breath, becomes a way to notice how the season is moving in you.
Returning to the garden of time
The Pagan Calendar is a living compass, still turning quietly beneath our overfilled calendars and glowing screens. Each season and its threshold calls the same truth through different tones: life is rhythmic, relational, and wise.
When we learn to move with that rhythm, the world begins to make sense again. The body breathes, the heart steadies, and the mind settles back into the wider rhythm of the living world. We return to the garden, to the soil that has always held us, and we begin to tend our small patch of creation with reverence.
This is the invitation: to live as Thresholders and co-creators, shaping destiny through presence rather than force. To cultivate capacity not as a self-help goal, but as sacred stewardship - of body, of Land, and of time itself.
If you’d like a way to begin, start small.
A warm drink.
A breath that finds its way back home.
Come Home to Your Body is a simple ritual drawn from Rewild Yourself, my foundational course on nervous system attunement and the rhythms of becoming. It’s a practice of slowing down enough to hear the quiet turning of the Wheel inside you.
When you live this way, the calendar stops being something that hangs on a wall. It becomes the pulse of your own becoming.