Exploring Magical Wheels, Seasons, and Cycles: Free Moon and Sun Wheels for Your Use

Here we are again, at the Equinox.  In my ecosystem in the Northern Hemisphere, we are standing at the point between the light half of the year and the dark half of the year, as the pumpkins and squash ripen, the nuts fall from the trees, and the days grow shorter.  In the Southern Hemisphere, our friends are experiencing the opposite–the days growing longer and spring returning.  Regardless of what gateway you stand at, the Equinoxes are a time of liminal space, of balance, and of transition. The Equinoxes always remind me that nature works in a cycle and a circle, and regardless of how much my own culture wants to promote linear thinking, nature’s wisdom reminds me to stay tied to nature’s cycles. Thus, I personally find the Equinoxes a good time to reflect on the balance of my own life and also to explore the ever-deepening cycle of the seasons.  I like to reflect: What am I taking with me into the dark half of the year? What am I leaving behind? How is the cycle continuing to deepen my own experience? Where did I find myself at the last turn of this wheel?  Where am I heading? What lessons is nature offering? How has nature changed as this season has progressed?

Today, in honor of the Fall Equinox, I want to offer two visual tools that I created you can use to map out your own magical wheels, cycles and seasons. These draw upon the two most important wheels in our lives: the wheel of the sun/seasonal wheel, and the wheel of the moon.  I first share the wheels and then offer some general thoughts on mapping, lines, cycles, and seasons and how you can use the tools!

The Sun Cycle Seasonal Wheel Tool

Mapping is a a very useful tool for exploring your own relationship to the cosmos: to the larger ecosystem and cycle of the sun, moon, and nature’s patterns in your life.  II have found it beneficial in my own practice to mapping out what my own sun and moon cycles look like, what nature’s cycles look like, and how this is tied to the ecosystem right outside of my door.  I have created two different visual tools for you to use (and I’m sharing both black and white and color versions that you can use, downloadable in high-resolution JPG and PDF format).  I drew and painted these tools by hand using an old-fashioned compass then scanned them–they are 100% human-created. To facilitate sharing and your own use, I put Creative Commons licenses on these, so feel free to share them and use them any way you’d like within the bounds of the CC License.

The first tool is the Sun Cycle / Seasonal Wheel tool. I created this tool was created for a temperate ecosystem with four seasons.  For me, I found that there were essentially three “phases” of each season creating a 12-fold wheel of the year–where the season in waxing, the season at full peak, and the season in the waning period as it begins to transition to the next.  I created this wheel to map out my observations on what looked like both in my ecosystem, as well as in my garden.  As climate change grows more extreme, I find that the calendar and my own past experience are less useful, so I’d rather look at what is happening.

You can use this mapping tool in any way you like–to frame your understanding, to map what is happening, to explore your own inner cycles, and more. See the rest of my post for more ideas!

Color version of the Seasonal Sun Wheel

• Printable high-resolution JPG
• Printable high-resolution PDF

Black and White version of the Seasonal Sun wheel

• Printable high-resolution JPG
• Printable high-resolution PDF

The Moon Cycle Wheel Tool

Just as the cycles of the sun take us through a full year, the cycle of the moon is reflected each month, allowing us to do inner work and explore cycles in a shorter period of time.  I again created this originally tool to track phases of my own life and to check in with myself as the moon phases change. You might find many other uses for this tool–again use it in whatever way you see fit.  One of the ways I use this is as a visual journal where I print this out and then write in it, checking in as the month progresses (and I talk more about moon journaling and this technique, offering prompts, in my self-paced Sacred Journaling course)

• Printable high-resolution JPG
• Printable high-resolution PDF

Lines vs. Circles and the Cycle of the Seasons

There’s a big difference between a line and a circle. A line implies a linear direction–movement forward.  Many current human systems operate in terms of lines and western culture is full of problematic linear thinking: the basic consumptive cycle (extraction–> creation of goods–>consumption –> disposal) or even the educational system (primary ed –> secondary ed –> higher ed–>job) among many other examples. We see this same linear thinking reflected in how humans view our history through what Greer describes as the Myth of Progress: the rise of human technology, the idea that technology is always advancing as humans do, and the most important thing is that ever-forawrd march toward progress. Many of us still believe in this, even if the myth is growing pretty old and worn out now.  And the myth of progress is everywhere in the stories we tell ourselves. But linear thinking is a myth that is currently threatening all life on this planet. Lines aren’t particularly natural, and they get us into problematic thinking patterns–patterns that have caused us to disregard the cycles of the land, the interconnectedness, and webs of relationships that we belong to–even if much of current human post-industrial civilizations forget this fact.

The circle, on the other hand, implies a very different set of relationships.  The circle recognizes that things are related, they flow, and we continue to return to them again and again. We see nature’s wisdom reflected in the cycle–an acorn falls from an oak, where the acorn is planted by a squirrel–and then forgotten about. The oak sprouts in the spring, eventually growing into a sapling, tapping into the mycelial web of life and being connected to something much greater.  The oak grows, matures, and in about 40 years, begins to produce acorns.  Eventually, our tall and ancient oak of several hundred years is at the end of her life cycle, and she begins to lose her leaves–just a little at first, then half of her crown the following season.  Then the vital life force leaves her, and the bugs and mushrooms move in. Our oak comes down to the ground and is turned into rich soil.  The gap in the canopy is filled with her baby oak trees from the nuts she produced and the squirrels helped plant. There is nothing wasted–the oak has gone through a full cycle of life.  Everything in nature works just like this–times of growth, fruition, decline, and death, only to regenerate again.

Nature’s cycle and seasons remind us that we are all connected and that we are all part of this cycle.  We have so many different cycles on the planet, the cycle of the sun (including the Equinox), the cycle of the moon, the hydrologic cycle, just to name a few.

The wheel of the seasons, progressing through an entire year, is the pattern of the sun.  The sun takes us through 365 days where how much light we get determines our climate patterns, growth on the land, and the periods of fallow and cold.  And while our climate may be changing, the pattern of the sun itself as a celestial body is constant.  The moon reflects this cycle every 28 days.

Mapping these cycles and seeing how they connect to our own lives is deeply fulfilling and rewarding work.  It allows you to better understand the cycles that unfold upon the landscape and also how those cycles unfold within ourselves.  This understanding can help us align with nature’s rhythms, connect us more deeply to the living earth, and get our heads out of linear thinking.

Conclusion

I hope these sun and moon tools are useful to you.  I would love to hear how you put these to use.  And if people like them, let me know because I can totally create more things in this genre and style! I’ve been in a drawing mood as of late, so happy to create more if they will be of use. I will also direct your attention to other graphics I released a few years ago: my ethical foraging tools (also released with a Creative Commons license).