Partners in Place

Begin with Curiosity
As you prepare to create your own Wheel, you might aside time to explore these focus questions (PDF) about your sense of place. How do you wonder? What does the phrase ‘home place’ mean to you? How does your home place move through time? In the process, you may discover which of the blank templates you will use for your first – or next – wheel.

Select a Cycle, Size, and Theme
Choose from among the blank templates to follow the cycle of a day, month, year, or lifetime, or choose to use the Blank Wheel to create your own template. See Orders to purchase Wheels, or draw your own versions. For more inspiration, go to the gallery, or for more guidance, refer to these variations on cycles, sizes and themes (PDF).

Gather Supplies
Perhaps you will use pencils and pens; colored pencils, markers or crayons; magazines, photos, maps, scissors, glue, and other materials for collage; a sketchbook, notebook, or written journal for “rough drafts” or to record more than we can fit on our wheel.

Begin at Any Time You Choose
Because the wheel is round, you may begin any time you are ready—a season, new moon, birthday, holiday, new beginning, or any other inspired moment.

Every Wheel has a center or hub. In the center of each Wheel you make, you place a map or image to reflect the place or theme you have selected and to anchor your practice of observation in time and space. As you think about your home place from its center, allow your perception of its boundaries to telescope out, like an increasing wide-angle view through a camera’s zoom lens, to encompass progressively larger geographic areas. Now come back. What is the shape and size of the geographic area you wish to represent in the center of your Wheel?

Here are some ideas:

• SIT SPOT a specific, single location where you sit still and let nature come to you
• HOME kitchen, porch, yard, cottage or garden
• A SPECIAL PLACE OUTSIDE park, walking path or route, a forest, beach, or mountain
• NEIGHBORHOOD community, or rural property
• WATERSHED bioregion, or other geographic area
• ALWAYS AT HOME an image of the home in your heart or being at home wherever you are

It is wonderful to think of Earth, the solar system, or the universe as your home; however, it is most likely that you will choose a smaller scale for your Wheel.

What will you use to represent your home place?

Maps for the Center
If you choose a map, will it be geographically accurate or symbolic? Will it be traced or cut and pasted from an existing map, or will it be a map of your own creation? For guidance, download Making Maps for the Center (PDF) to get you started.

A Centering Image
If you choose an image other than a map, will you create your own image or use one that you find already in print material? Will you use a photo or a found object, like a leaf or feather? You might return to the focus questions (PDF) in your quest for a centering image.

Cycles and seasons move our sense of place through time. The map or image you place in the center of your Wheel provides a hub to anchor the basic features or themes that remain relatively constant over time. A routine practice of making and recording observations will begin to transform your Wheel into a circular journal.

Wheels for a Specific Year If you are drawn to use a Wheel of the Year with the phases of the moon in the outer ring, you will need to select one that starts in a specific year (from 2009 – 2015) and month. For the latter, you will choose a Wheel that begins at the time of the full moon closest to either:

January 1, a traditional New Year’s start time for many journal keepers
OR
September 1, the start time of many schools and activities, and close to the new year of some spiritual traditions

The Reasons The moon’s phases, as we observe them from earth, average 29.53 days (and, due to perturbations in its orbit, vary from 29.26 to 29.80) while the average calendar month is about 30.4 days. Thus, in order for the moon phases to align with the calendar dates on the Wheels, we need to construct a new Wheel for every year.

The difference between the lunar and solar cycles has vexed calendar-makers for millennia, resulting in many different approaches to keeping a common calendar. Our circular calendars offer you an opportunity to track time according to the natural rhythms of the moon in relation to our artificial twelve-month calendar. See the Resources and Links for web sites that provide the exact dates and times of the moon phases in each year.