Iranians celebrate the new year in the spring near March 21 as do
many Asian cultures. The Islam and Jewish new year is in the fall,
close enough to September 21. Compromising cultures like
America
celebrate December 21 plus 10 days for the sake of confusing
calendrical history. Especially
the Asian and American ways seem
pretty obvious because they pretty much go along with the life
cycle
of plants of one sort of another, but also the religious way of doing
it
is easy to understand because it goes along with the life cycle of
planning and planting crops.
So since no one else is doing June 21 and since there is only one
more obvious astronomical year-celebrating point to chose, and
since June 21 is the anti Christmas, but also since the metaphor of
seeing lush summer maturity as the beginning of the life cycle is
difficult poetically and so this maybe a way forward since it would
require a higher level of common cultural understanding --- since
all
of that, why not celebrate New Years on June 21st?
Personally life started for me at 13 or 21, in the summer of my
life,
when I gained some kind of independence and responsibility. Since
then it has pretty much been a slow dying to where I now exist in
a
cold rock-strewn, wind-swept post apocalyptic landscape with a
few
dead tree skeletons scattered like Halloween effigies.
A June 21 New Years would give me hope that possibly there is
some
kind of spring ahead and that it might be a kind of recapitulation
of
my original proto-senescence.
But it might also be, like Christianity was an opportunity for the
Romans to bring together northern and southern traditions in a
new
kind of compromise, an opportunity to bring together eastern and
western world traditions in a new way.