Two Faces of Time

Peering into a new year

Jan 13, 2024

Every January I cling to the diminishing dark, wishing its cozy containment could continue just a little longer. It’s a creative incubator, a stillpoint of so much potential. I love to introduce my clients into this reverie. If you hate the dark and cold, please let me sway you.

I take the stretch between New Year’s Eve and February 2 as a time to assess the past year (and beyond) and to think about the year to come, setting intentions. In many traditional European cultures Candlemas (or Imbolc) on February 2 is the true beginning of of the new year, halfway between winter solstice and spring equinox when the first inklings of spring appear and the returning daylight in most of the the northern hemisphere is sufficiently ample to sprout a seed. We’ll have ten hours and three seconds of daylight in the Hudson Valley on February 2 this year, just enough.

So this new beginning is tethered to the truth, but it’s also beneficial to use the concept of January as a whole to create space and time for a slower roll out. January is overseen by Janus, the Roman god of doorways, keys, mirrors and passageways, looking both forward and back in time. He rules beginnings and endings, with the five shrines erected to him in ancient Rome built near river crossings and bridges. He’s a portal, and a time god, an archetype that grounds into the present moment while facing both forward and back. Tuning into what Janus-ness feels like, letting my vision drift into the peripheries and possibilities provides a different approach than working with the narrow focus of the cognitive mind to create resolutions.

But even more poetically, and potently, in Chinese medicine the spirit of this watery yin season is constellated in the image of the Two-Headed Deer, also looking deeply into time. This numinous symbol has the given name To Nourish the Infant, as one of my mentors Lorie Dechar describes in her book Kigo. The mystical deer is a reminder that will and life-force pass from one generation to the next, but also cultivate the spiritual life growing in our deepest bodies. “This second function of the Two-Headed Deer is what allows it to become the nourishing spirit of destiny,” she writes. It’s an embodied potential.

Rising to meet these delicious portals to a re-imagined destiny with questions, each like a key, helps me align. Some are basic: What would I love to build upon or continue in the new year? Others have a surgical edge: What am I tolerating that needs to end? A few more lean into the rising dawn: Where is my curiosity leading just now? Tuning into the body’s felt sense as the ideas come concretizes them, guiding each into the present.

If you’ve ever been in a call with me, you know how fundamental attuning to desire in this articulated way can be. Saying out-loud what you’d love to nourish in the upcoming year makes it that much more possible. When you know what you’re looking for, you are more likely to find it. And yet, as these two-headed deities insist, will alone does not fuel the most luminous fires. Both Janus and To Nourish the Infant offer an invitation to look into time with the quality of having two sets of eyes.

These days I’ve been waking up in the still deep dark to make tea by candlelight so I can sit staring out the window, waiting for the sun while musing on these questions. We’ve only got two more weeks of quiet dark to take counsel with the fleeting two-headed deities of time, imagining what’s ahead via what’s anchored in the past, and listening for a future that’s just coming into being, on its own, like the hull of a seed suddenly cracking with life force.