I have always loved calendars. Rhythms. Hours. Years. And especially seasons.

The 1970’s California monastery calendar my grandmother sent us every year.

The Sierra Club datebook calendars in which my father kept his appointments. He held it closed with a big rubber band, so as not to lose the many little notes inside.

The wall calendar with images of birth and motherhood that stayed up long after we had decided that having children was not in the cards.

The calendar from the Pagan campground—Orisha birthdays and Wiccan cross-quarter days marked in bold, as well as local holidays and festivals.

And planner after planner after planner until the Moleskine academic year calendar stole my heart.

Now, while I use an electronic calendar for most things, I still love to page through calendars, large and small, and I especially love round ones.

I find analog clock faces and round, multi-layered calendars so inviting, so evocative of the rolling hips of Earth.

Round calendars, like the ones that figure out the dates of a pregnancy. Or the ones that show you where the liturgical feasts and solemnities will fall in a given year.

Or better yet, mandala-drawing calendars of the seasons. I love those best of all. Devoid of days or numbers or weeks or months, they spin season to season around the year.

There may be Jewish and Muslim calendars like this, with lunar months and holidays and feasts and fasts and festivals. And Asian ones too, perhaps. I do not know them all.

I only know the places I have been.

The wheel of the year turns. The river flows to the sea. Earth turns and spins and dances with the sun.

All this turning, all these spirals and circles and wheels and spheres lead me here. This place where I offer some thoughts along the way, some perspectives from the leaf in the stream floating toward the source and return, the Sea.

Will you spin with me?