#013 We are the time travelers we've been waiting for
The last day of a cycle is also the most essential for a new one. Perseverance. Endurance. Presence. How to love your journey until here to not try to change what already happened but to accept and move on to the next cycle? Love and happiness. Transcending is never easy. It is the last of the 4th stages of time, but this one comes in one single step, our final lesson. Can you hold it being present?
13. Trancendence (the cosmic factor, inviting us to endure, to develop presence)
To your self-reflection:
How can I expand my joy and love? How to be fully present in what my journey needs now?
Duolingo Streak
I've been starting studying German on Duolingo now. The app was important while I was building confidence in my English skills (I keep feeling surprised that I am not writing in my mother tongue right now!) and also to practice some Dutch when I moved to Amsterdam. Searching for new challenges, I started quite recently learning a new language. Last weekend I was watching TV with some friends and one of them, suddenly, stopped paying attention and got up because had forgotten to do his lesson for a day or two on the app and he was afraid to lose his "streak". This is an important concept I want to borrow for our exchange, the Duolingo streak. The app has a feature that tracks the number of days in a row you have completed a lesson. Once you complete a lesson through the app or web, your streak will increase by 1 day. To find out more, I read an article about the habit-building research behind your Duolingo streak. First, consistency is key and every day counts. If you are just starting to build or to change a habit, even more.
Our data shows that the streak is highly motivating for new and veteran learners alike, but the reason it feels motivating can vary based on the current length of your streak. If you’re just getting started on Duolingo, extending your streak feels like a bigger accomplishment each day compared to when a seasoned learner with a longer streak extends theirs. This varying sense of achievement makes sense mathematically: a learner’s streak going from 2 to 3 days represents a 50% increase in its length, whereas going from 200 to 201 days is merely an increase of 0.5%!When your streak is new, seeing it tick up every day—from two, to three, to four days—is an exciting reminder that you’re building momentum and settling into a habit.
And we all need a little flexibility, right? We know we are not starting everything from zero if we lose one day or two after a long round of learning. I know, for instance, that I prefer to do some tasks in batches – for example, the ones involving drawing and posting a new 13-kin cycle – with the promise of some pause. I know myself enough to have learned that nothing demotivates me more than a list of new tasks in a current project right after a big round or its deliverables. I need to breathe, celebrate the small achievements, and share compliments with the team about what we did while we all get ready for a new cycle. So pauses should be considered in a streak as well as part of the process.
For many learners, keeping a long streak is difficult because life can get busy! Whether it’s taking care of family members, getting caught up with work, or just needing a day to unplug, everyone has valid reasons for occasionally missing a day or two of practice. Enter: streak flexibility. The Streak Freeze, which allows you to hit pause on your streak for a day, is designed to grant this type of flexibility when you need a day off. At first, this may seem like a dishonest way to maintain a streak, but having this type of leeway actually helps people stay persistent. Again, we look at the research: a study from University of Pennsylvania and UCLA demonstrates that offering people a little "slack" as they pursue their goals can actually be more motivating than having a rigid set of rules.
Yes, I am bringing something as practical and efficient as the theory and science behind habit-building and learning a new language on Duolingo because it is exactly what we've been doing here about our relationship with time. Daily, steadily, we've been building our conscious temporal streak. How many days can I live with the awareness that everything shall pass? That everything, from a kiss to a rock, is temporary? That we all relate to time, we are all temporary, as a job, as a carreer, as a person, as a gender, as a race, as a society, as a species, as a planet... everything is temporal.
So, today, and every day, I want to celebrate with you our temporal streak. This is day 13 of the new cycle we've been starting together. A cycle of 260 days, but we start looking at each and every sequence of 13 days, 20 of them. We just finished the first! Congratulations for showing up! Remember I told you about the Harmonic Convergence in 1987? They started to do the same, counting rounds of the 260 days of the Tzolkin – a fractal of our galactic spins – and also the years – or solar rings. The Mayan used to count long cycles of 5125 years or, in their own year unit, 5200 tuns (52, hey!). Now we are at the beginning of the 49th spin since the global event in 87, which consciously restarted the counting, and in the year 34th.
That's why I bring in my signature also the date with 34.12.2. (year 34, month 12, day 1) starting with NS1 (1st new Syrian cycle). Here I can bring an extra layer explaining the mystery of 52. days, months, and years are cycles that only make sense because we are on Earth. They are different lengths on Venus or Mars, for example. So what about a cycle that can use as a compass for other stars and the center of the galaxy itself? Welcome to the Syrian Cycle
Sirian Cycle
Sirius is the brightest visible star in our sky. Sirius is not a single star, but a system. I first learned that studying the connection of the Dogon People with it. They knew before science about the existence of the system, without any modern technological equipment. They said those who taught them about Sirius A, B and C were their ancestors. Because their ancestors came from the stars. Many original people have this narrative – and I want to deep dive into it at some point, to write about panspermia and proprioception, for example – but today our point is to talk about the cycle in which the Sirius system spins around each other: 52 years. There is also a 52-year cycle between our sun and the Pleiades. a second, the star Sirius.
Here's a brief context, which may interest you for bringing some synchronicity or for simple curiosity: these two stars, our Sun and Sirius, "meet" and align in the sky at the end of July, when a new year then begins and lasts. then for 13 months of 28 days, the average between known lunar cycles. The Mayans navigated time guided by it and the Egyptians also mark their new year in the same period, but I want to stay in the present, talking about today. Since then, it has been 34 years since the harmonic convergence, but the count that preceded and inspires it is as old as the knowledge of native peoples or nations beyond the West.
Aztecs perform a special religious ceremony called the Dance of the New Fire (or Ceremony of the New Fire) once every 52 years to ensure the movement of the cosmos and the rebirth of the sun. This 52 year time period also corresponds to the 260-day religious calendar (Tonalpohualli in Aztec, or Tzolkin in Mayan) when it interlocks with the 365-day civil calendar (Xiupohualli in Aztec or Haab in Mayan). Every 52 Haab solar years (73 Tolkin years) these calendars coincide. This was sometimes called by the Aztecs the Calendar Round. The 52 year cycle was said to begin when the Pleiades crossed the fifth cardinal point or the zenith of heaven at midnight. Sometimes not only is the Pleiades in its zenith over Mesoamerica, but this alignment also comes into a full conjunction with the sun. In addition, two 52 year cycles (104 years) coordinate with a further alignment with Venus (symbolic of the female creative form on a local scale).
The NS1 in the dates refers to the "New Sirian Cycle" (so this year is the 34 of 52 years counting). Every day-counting system is a convention, be it political, religious, or any natural or unused principle. In this effort to understand our role in the cosmos, harmonic convergence drew on natural cycles of the cosmos beyond the solar system and named its synchronic convention, a synchronization artifact. But my point here is that we have a lot to learn when we think about ourselves not only on the planetary scale but as cosmic beings. Read it again. I am talking about us. We are cosmic beings. We exist in the cosmos, not isolated from it. And, if the ancestors of the Dogon people were right. We are the time travelers we've been waiting for.
Today's solar seal is called the Red Skywalker. This invitation to understand that the story of the being that has birth and is walking as a human in the previous 12 days of our archetypical journey belongs to the stars. If from the industrial revolution to conquer the space we took just 200 years as species, how to walk with wakefulness in our next steps?
Temporality Lab
At the same time/ How don't lose touch with the ground and our roots? A reminder that we are not only living in the world but we are also the manifestation of the ideas of the world, of the field of this specific world. So, lets recap our 13 reflections until here? Hope to get to know more about your journey of birth on this subject. Tomorrow I will tell you more about it how.
What is my purpose?
What is my challenge?
How can I best serve?
What is the form my service will take?
How can I best empower myself?
How can I extend my equality to others?
How can I attune my service to others?
Do I live what I believe?
How do I attain my purpose?
How do I perfect what I do?
How do I release and let go?
How can I dedicate myself to all that lives?
How can I expand my joy and love?
Writing fueled of joy and love,
Gustavo Nogueira de Menezes
NS1.34.12.02, Monday 31 May 2022
Kin 013 Red Cosmic Skywalker
