Ritual, Place, and Remembering What Was Ours

Why Have We Turned Out Instead Of In?

Capitalism has suppressed our seasonal earth based wisdom and we need to claim it back.

Happy New Year.

Or is it?

Anyone else feel off this time of year?

My body has refused to cooperate with the NYE narrative being sold for sometime now.

Because something ancient is missing.

I started delving into books about ritual through bone tiredness, and questioning everything. I like to analyse. It’s a gift. It helps me to discover, learn and embody clarity. When people tell me I analyse too much? I smile.

If only they knew.

Like many of us in the West, I have spent years learning fragments of other traditions. Christianity, Yoga, Meditation, Buddhism, a touch of Ayurveda, a sprinkle of astrology, human design, gene keys…I love it all. It’s all useful and meaningful stuff and as practices - they work but to me, often feel imported.

Like putting my favourite houseplants in the wrong soil.

My curiosity lead me to search backwards. Myths, folklore, Godess stories…you name it.

When I moved to Gozo, a land that time almost forgot…the land beneath my feet spoke to me loud and clear. It made me question what I once knew, before time was sliced into me like neat blocks and sold back to me as productivity.

Everything started to make sense to me in a completely different way.

I found myself questioning the way we mark time, especially the insistence that January 1st represents some kind of universal beginning. New Years Eve/Day suddenly stopped landing…in my body.

As the calendar reset, I felt tired rather than inspired, reflective rather than ready. I assumed this was a personal failing until I began looking more closely at how time was understood before it was standardised.

What I’ve learned has shifted something. In older European traditions, particularly Celtic ones, the year did not begin in the depth of winter. January belonged to endings, not beginnings. The land was still dormant. Energy was inward. A necessary phase of natural integration.

Historically, festivals like Imbolc in February signalled the subtle return of light and the tending of the inner flame, not outward action, but preparation. That alone made more sense to me than any resolution ever had.

Even biologically, this framing makes sense. The circadian and seasonal rhythms shows that in winter, melatonin levels rise, dopamine tends to drop, and the nervous system naturally shifts towards repair rather than expansion.

We are not designed to sprint at the coldest, darkest point of the year.! Years of self-judgement and procrastination have now been understood as gestation.

Astrologically, this deepened further. In traditional sky-based astrology, the energetic New Year doesn’t arrive in January at all, but at the Spring Equinox, when the Sun enters Aries. This is when light and dark come back into balance and momentum begins to build naturally.

How much body sense does that make?

This all matched my lived experience. During December my days of focus are short and I want to sleep for eternity. By March and April, my energy returns without effort.

All these layers together, seasonal, biological, cultural, astrological, helped something huge settle in me. The problem was I was trying to live in a linear system that ignored the intelligence of cycles.

I discovered that it’s not just the East that holds such learning. Europe was never short on ritual. It simply stopped listening to itself.

Before calendars were ruled by empire and industry, ritual here was practical. Seasonal. Unremarkable in the best way. Planting and harvesting, lighting fires at the right moment, and knowing when to rest without apology is what it’s all about.

Time is something we move with.

As power consolidated, cycles became inconvenient. Rest and stillness didn’t generate profit. Capitalism reorganised our attention! Our true body intelligence of seasons has been replaced with constant forward motion.

Winter became something we endure rather than gracefully inhabit. No wonder so many of us feel permanently out of sync!

Place started to matter to me. Environments, energy, light….My body responds so differently in long winters than it does in equatorial heat.

Astrocartography gave me the language here. It’s also intuitive. Different lands wake up different parts of us. Not symbolically, but materially. Nervous systems, hormones, sleep, mood. Land shapes consciousness whether we acknowledge it or not.

The Celts understood this without needing diagrams. Time moved in circles. Thresholds mattered more than dates. Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane. These weren’t celebrations in the Instagram sense. They were massive orientation points guiding us on how to be human in a living world.

If you read anything in this - read The Celtic Year by Alison Davies. She explores old Celtic rhythms, practices, beliefs and festivals and places seasonal markers in the context of nature and our shared human experience.

What I’ve learned, is that remembering these rhythms doesn’t require reenactment or performance. It simply asks for our attention. To the season inside and out.

Find Your Ritual.

The need to catch up, achieve, accomplish, and be productive - finally has its place. And so does rest, recuperation, reflection and resetting.

When energy dips, and direction blurs, it’s meant to be.

I’m not pissing on the chips of New Year celebrations. I champion any reason to uplift ourselves and each other. But forgotten rituals, and true seasonal shifts should be widely known.

As I now understand them, they are less about ceremony and more about our personal relationship with land, time and our bodies.

We should move at the pace of what’s actually happening, rather than what we’re told should be happening.

Our natural flow.

Then, we will really feel like we’re remembering something important.

Happy wintering X