The Year of the Ox

(Note: all the individual pictures in this post link to larger images in Flickr; just click on the smaller images you see here.)

“Chinese New Year” was this past January 26th. It falls on a different day every year in our calendar system (the Gregorian calendar) because the “Chinese New Year” is based on the lunisolar calendar and the two calendar systems are mathematically incommensurate (don’t come out even). I put “Chinese New Year” in quotes because it’s not just Chinese who follow the lunisolar calendar, but also the Hebrew, Buddhist, Hindu, and all other Asian cultures. There are other variants of the lunisolar calendar, such as the Hawaiian calendar based on ancient Polynesian navigational calendars. Often all these calendars are simply called “lunar calendars,” but they are actually based on the movements of both the moon and the sun (hence the term “lunisolar”). Only the Islamic calendar is strictly lunar and does not reference the sun at all. Some countries, such as Thailand, have more than one lunar calendar (pre 1888 and post 1888). In Japan the calendar is based on the reign of the current emperor. The French Revolution even installed a revolutionary calendar that abolished Sunday and had 10 day work-weeks…fortunately, that didn’t quite catch on.

The “Chinese New Year” begins a festival (the Spring Festival) lasting about 15 days, culminating in the Lantern Festival, which this year fell on February 9th. Here is a good, short description of the lantern festival and its background. This Youtube video captures the release of the sky lanterns in Taiwan this past year. Absolutely beautiful. These staggeringly gorgeous photos from the Boston Globe show pictures of this year’s festival in Beijing including shots of the unfortunate CCTV building fire. If you want to buy some Chinese paper lanterns, you can order them from the Paper Lantern Store.

This article, Lunar New Year Across Asia, details many of the interesting facts about traditional foods and customs associated with the celebration of the lunar new year in Japan, India, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and Singapore. Everywhere there are large communities of Asians living, including here in the west, the lunar new year is celebrated in some traditional fashion. Chinese astrology associates different years with different animals. 2009 is the year of the ox. If you want to see what animal sign you were born under, use this calculator. Needless to say, the astrological dates given on placemats in Chinese fast-food restaurants are not entirely accurate.

Here’s a listing of the Spring Festival celebration in major cities in the US and around the world. I was fortunate to live in Honolulu for a couple years and it’s so heavily celebrated there that I knew to abandon my ground floor apartment and get a room on the upper floor of a hotel just to avoid choking on the unimaginable smoke from the firecrackers. Of course, San Francisco’s celebration (got to experience one of those, too–it’s a little frightening to be in the middle of) is amazing. I wish it were celebrated in Tampa Bay but there’s no public celebration here.

One tradition I particularly miss from my short time in Honolulu was the “red paper” that you could buy at new years to hang on either side of your home’s doorway. A master Chinese calligrapher would write auspicious sayings on the strips of red paper with his brush dipped in gold ink. It is a dream of mine to get to be in mainland China during the Spring Festival. Of course, because the Spring Festival is centered around the family, everyone, who can, goes home to visit family who usually live in the rural countryside, not the city, so the cities are not their usual bustling selves. But, even so, I would love to be in China to celebrate Chinese New Year, at least once.

I’ve only been to China for one visit and for a very short time (less than a week–all the pictures in this post are from that trip). I do so hope to be able to go again, and for a longer time. Once is not enough. Would even a thousand times be enough? Experiencing a culture millennia older than my own lifts my spirits so high, seeing the mountains the ancients saw, walking on the ground they walked on, touching an urn they touched. Much of their old is very very old. Not just the old, but also the new. Much of their new is very very new. And, of course, the food, the sounds, the language, and the people—their faces, voices, clothes, mannerisms, attitudes, emotions, movements, habits…

Alan Watts, the philosopher who helped to popularize Zen Buddhism in the west, spoke about the clock-mad world. It’s a worthwhile thought, isn’t it? Imagine a world where our time was measured by movements of the moon, the sun, the stars, where our lives weren’t poured into vessels of minutes and hours. Our abstractions aren’t commensurate with reality. Nature isn’t tidy. Time isn’t either.

This happens in music, too. The twelve notes in the musical scale aren’t really equidistant from each other. But we make them so out of convenience. As a consequence, even-tempered (equal distance between notes) music always sounds slightly “off” because, in reality the scale spirals outward into infinity. It does not really form a closed, perfectly repeating loop. This is why an a cappella (unaccompanied) choral group (or any non-keyboard music) sounds so much better than one accompanied by a keyboard (which is even-tempered). Humans can automatically make the infinite adjustments that un-tempered music requires, instantly and unconsciously. So, too, can humans more harmoniously experience their life’s time if its measurements are tied to the physical world instead of arbitrary divisions. So, too, our lives if “The Rules” are less stringent and flow from the heart rather than the head.

If you ever think about going to China but hesitate for any reason, please put aside all fears and “prudent” considerations. Go. You won’t regret it. Perhaps I, too, can manage to visit again, and, hopefully, soon. I long to see all the dear friends who I’ve made there. Until then: 牛年吉祥. Good luck in the year of the Ox.