The Vigil Between Years

Tonight is called New Year’s Eve,

but only if you’re following a clock that was never meant to listen to the body.

By older reckoning — lunar, seasonal, honest — this is not an ending.

It is not a beginning.

It is a vigil.

A moment of watchfulness that belongs to no calendar.

In a thirteen-moon rhythm, the year does not turn because numbers change.

It turns when the Earth signals readiness — when light returns with intent, when sap rises, when life leans forward again.

That turning comes later.

In April.

When renewal is lived, not announced.

Long before January was crowned the beginning, April already was.

And when calendars were rewritten, those who continued to live by older time — by land, season, and body — were mocked.

They were called foolish for not complying with the new order of time.

That mockery lingered.

It became ritual.

It became joke.

What we now call April Fools’ Day is not about silliness at all —

it is the echo of a dismissal.

A cultural bruise left behind when natural time was replaced by controlled time.

April didn’t become foolish.

It was made foolish.

And yet — the Earth never agreed.

Even now, April is when life begins again in earnest.

Seeds stir.

Bodies wake.

Instinct sharpens.

Life has always kept its own calendar.

So tonight, I am not releasing a year.

I am carrying one.

I am noticing what stayed with me when nothing was promised.

What endured without applause.

What remained steady when everything else asked to be counted, measured, declared.

There are no resolutions here.

No ceremonial shedding.

No symbolic rebirth.

Those belong to louder time.

This is quieter time — the kind that asks only one question:

What is still true?

The answer does not arrive as a list.

It arrives as continuity.

As a hum that says: I am still here. I am still listening.

Nothing real expired tonight.

Nothing essential requires a reset.

When the true new year comes — when the land opens and the body agrees — I will begin again with intention.

But until then, I keep watch.

I tend what survived.

I honour what carried me.

This is not the end of anything.

It is the space between breaths —

and that, too, is sacred.