Why We Only Get 12 Months, and Why That Might Be the Problem…
You know what’s mad?
As soon as July slips off the calendar, I feel a coldness creep in. Not just in the air, but somewhere deeper. Like something’s pulling away. The light goes a little thinner. The evenings arrive too early. And I can’t help but feel like the seasons are out of sync, like life is shifting, but we’re all pretending we don’t notice.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe:
We weren’t meant to live by this crooked calendar. 12 uneven months, 30 here, 31 there, and poor February with 28 days, barely hanging on.
Why?
Why all this imbalance when life itself, nature, bodies, tides, and even moods, tend to cycle in 28-day rhythms?
Turns out, there was another way.
Long before emperors carved their names into the calendar, many ancient cultures followed the lunar cycle, 13 months of 28 days, totaling 364. Add a day of rest, and you’ve got a neat, complete year. Simple. Rhythmic. Natural.
The moon, after all, doesn’t lie. It waxes and wanes in 28-ish days. Women’s bodies still remember. So do farmers, animals, and ocean tides. So maybe we do too, somewhere under all the noise.
But empires don’t like moonlight. They prefer order. Squares. Systems. Power.
So along came Julius Caesar, reshaping time itself in 45 BCE. He gave us the Julian Calendar. Twelve months, solar-based, for military and farming. Then Augustus Caesar decided he wanted a month too, and that’s why July and August both have 31 days. (Ego doesn’t come cheap, so February lost a day to balance it out.)
And just when you think it couldn’t get any more twisted, along came the Gregorian calendar in 1582. Pope Gregory XIII decided the Julian version wasn’t precise enough. So, to fix a seasonal drift (especially around Easter), he skipped 10 whole days and revised the leap year rules. People literally woke up to find the date had jumped from October 4 to October 15. Imagine that, ten days of your life gone by decree. And yes, people rioted: “Give us back our days!”
But the real crime?
They still left the calendar lopsided. Twelve awkward months, all patched up like a bad haircut. No room for the moon. No rhythm that matched the body.
The calendar got more “accurate” for taxes and holidays, but we became less aligned with nature.
Now, when I feel the season shift at the start of August, I trust it. It’s not just me being dramatic. It’s memory. Body memory. Earth memory. Moon memory.
There was a time when we lived in sync with that, Thirteen moons. Thirteen natural months. Rest days. Sacred cycles. Celebrations that marked the real turning points.
Maybe that’s why we feel so tired, so rushed, so disoriented sometimes.
Maybe we’re not lazy or broken or moody. Maybe we’re just living in the wrong rhythm.
And maybe, just maybe, it’s time we remembered. My bones do.
Mae 🧡
Both the Mayan and Celtic calendars reflect deeply spiritual and cyclical understandings of time. The Mayan calendar, with its intricate systems like the Tzolk’in (260-day sacred calendar), tracked cosmic rhythms and was used for divination and ritual. Similarly, the Celtic calendar followed natural cycles, with festivals like Samhain and Beltane marking seasonal thresholds and spiritual portals. Both traditions emphasized the importance of aligning with the rhythms of nature and the unseen world.
UNDER THE WILL... OVER THE DRAMA... 
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