Happy New Year! Well, a happy new year to those who are celebrating it today, anyway.
Personally I’m all for celebrating the new year as often as possible. I celebrate it on Advent Sunday, along with the rest of the western Church, at Easter, when I generally stop feeling so grim, and at my birthday. I also celebrate it when the number ticks over from 2017 to 2018 and, if necessary, at the start of the academic year in September. But Advent is, for me, the big one. I take the whole month to do it. Ease the new year in gently. Look back, look forward. Light some candles. Sulk about how everyone else seems to be managing to be cheerful and excited.
Usually I observe Advent with some kind of reflective, communal, blogging exercise, but the days of reflective, communal blogging exercises seem to be past. Besides, I don’t seem to be in the mood for asking myself searching questions or nominating the best book or best day of 2017. I want to do something, but it’s not Reverb; so I think I shall just bumble around and do my own thing, picking and choosing exercises from elsewhere on the internet, and not answering any questions if I can help it.
I’m starting with a compass, identifying the qualities I wish to have in my orbit in 2018.
North is COURAGE
North East is TRUST
East is LOVE
South East is INTEGRITY
South is HOPE
South West is PRESENCE
West is JOY
North West is HAVEN
Some of these are concepts that have been important to me for several years. PRESENCE was my word for this year just gone. INTEGRITY came in around 2012, I think, and hasn’t left. COURAGE got me through 2014. HAVEN, on the other hand, is a new one. I’ll probably end up writing about some or all of these at some point over the next couple of weeks.
After writing the qualities in, I put the quarter days at the cardinal points, and the changes of season at the ordinals. (My life has been much better since I decided that summer begins on May Day and August is actually part of autumn.) I also put my three main new years on there. Other than Lady Day/Easter, they’re slightly out of step with the rest of the compass, but they do seem to want to be on there.
Some of the conjunctions between festivals and qualities are striking; some are amusing. PRESENCE coming in at Lammas, just after my birthday, is both. Some I don’t quite see. (HOPE needs to come in at Midsummer, otherwise it’s downhill all the way; but why JOY at Michaelmas?)
Anyway, knowing me I’ll either revisit this every day until next Advent, or forget about it immediately. Or revisit it every day for the next three weeks and then forget about it completely.
Courage to trust; love with integrity;
Hope for presence; joy in the haven.
Haven for joy; present with hope;
Integrity of love; trusting courage.
Courage/Hope
Love/Joy
Trust/Presence
Integrity/Haven
Courage with love, hope with joy
Trust in integrity, present in the haven
Kathleen Jowitt 
I love your practice of celebrating the new year multiple times Kathleen – I’m drawn to doing that as well. Your Advent practice is lovely – taking a month is spacious and expansive and allows for deep diving no doubt. But I’m particularly intrigued by your compass – what a beautiful way to orient yourself to what you wish to call in. Wishing you a most wondrous 2018.
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Deep diving – that’s it exactly. And this will be the first time I’ve spent an entire year with the same compass – it’ll be interesting to see how that works. And may 2018 be full of wonderful things for you, too.
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Calendrical New Year is the big one for me. My ‘Goodbye’ and ‘Hello’ blog posts have become an important tradition for me. I’ve tried choosing a word for the year, but a year is such a long time. I’ve had years where the end was completely different from the start, and in an entirely unexpected way. That’s why I think I prefer the Doors calendar — a new word for each month, and having someone else choose the word seems to work better for me as well.
Anyway, enough about me — happy New Year!
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