Since the 18th of February, when the new year bearer Mam Oxlajuj Iq’ was seated, I have been listening with a sensitive ear and alert mind to the sweeping winds of change it has brought. These currents have shaken all of us profoundly, across the world. The hurricane force of Oxlajuj Iq’ has appeared as a powerful messenger, amplifying the global wake-up call in the face of worsening climate crisis and the shock waves of political instability – yet it can be seen also as bringer of great transformation, enthusiasm, and inspiration. With the numeral force 13, it resonates with the voices of ancestors and subtle realms, strengthening their presence.
The influence of the year bearer reached its peak in June, around the summer solstice. In July, at the heart of summer, I entered a creative retreat – a much-needed pause, that allowed me to listen and breath in more deeply the message Oxlajuj Iq’ holds for my own life. I experienced its vortex as spiritual purification, followed by a whirlwind that carried me into revitalised realms of words and writing.
Immersed in the millennial time wisdom of the Maya, I stepped into a spiral of times, where a unifying cosmovision set the multi-calendar system into a spiralling motion. I experienced Oxlajuj Iq’ as the calm eye of a hurricane: multiplicity settling into clarity, time unfolding in many translucent layers, interwoven with radiant strands. Freed from the Gregorian everyday calendar – with its fragmentation and constricting haste – I could dwell freely in my own timings, at their spacious centre, in the core of my Tree of Times: in fluid presence of multiple words. In that flowing stillness, I felt the deepest essence of my own temporal experience – my true cosmic address.
THE MAYA COSMOVISION AND PLANETARY TIMEWISENING
Our contemporary world is dominated by the acceleration of time, its abstract linearity, and the gridded efficiencies of compartmentalised calendars. Estranged from nature, we submit daily rhythms dictated by digital clocks operating with split-second precision. The need for deeper temporal wisdom has never been more urgent.
The human disturbance is unravelling planetary homeostasis – eroding biodiversity, driving species extinction, and degrading the subtle, intricate web of ecosystems at increasing speed. The pressures of the environmental emergency demand from us more than a rethinking of economics, technology, and values: they require that we re-examine our relationship to time itself, in its deepest cultural and civilisational roots.
What if time were not something to be sliced and measured, but something we could once again learn to listen to? What if time were not a straight line or an arrow, but a living weave of cosmic forces and rhythms, in which we participate, for a brief and precious moment of human life, embedded in the dance of vast intersecting temporal dimensions?
Amid the global polycrisis, indigenous systems of time wisdom still endures, offering valuable time-tested guidance for aligning ourselves with more organic, nature-based temporalities. Among the most sophisticated are the multi-calendar systems of the Maya and other Mesoamerican civilizations. The Maya science of time, and the cosmovision that unites it, can serve as an example of planetary timewisening: rhythms of renewal derived from mathematically precise astronomical observation, yet grounded in a planetary root system and ecosystemic networks of mythopoetic meaning.
This is not mere nostalgia, but cultural deep time memory – a methodological path, where larger cosmovision is integrated with cosmopraxis. This is cosmology embodied as daily acts of belonging and kinship.
We should not regard the Maya multi-calendar system only as a relic of a vanished world, but as a living gift: a multidimensional and multirhythmic architecture of time. It contains vital insights into how humanity might root its consciousness deeply in the living Earth and in a reciprocal temporal relationship with the entire cosmos.
Unlike the homogenising, mechanical Gregorian calendar, the Maya system is composed of many interwoven and complementary calendars, together reflecting the layered, polyrhythmic nature of planetary interbeing. This is not one calendar, but a cosmos of calendars – each tuned with great finesse to follow a particular cycle of birth, life, death, and return.
These calendars are woven together not only by astronomical and mathematical precision, but also by a broader cosmovision in which time is sacred, emergent, multidimensional, and alive. Every moment is a crossroads of cosmic forces. Every day has its own sacred essence, responsibility, and ethical call. Maya calendars reveal a temporal awareness and intelligence that operates on a vast scale: the ability to perceive time not merely as a linear continuum, but as a woven fabric of multi-temporal relationships. Maya Time Wisdom is a poetics of temporality grounded in astronomy, mathematics, and planetary cycles – a poetics in which l living, interactive rhythm takes precedence over mechanical control and measurement.
Here, the subtle understanding of time and cultivation of temporal harmony are more essential than conquering, spending or ’using’ time.
Maya time wisdom opens the way for a temporal culture that is polyrhythmic – honouring the coexistence of biological, intergenerational, ecological, deep-time, and cosmic rhythms. It fosters an ecological co-creation in which no single species dictates the pulse of the whole. Life is honoured in its full temporal diversity, allowing many relation-based timings flourish within the wider web of interdependence.
MAYA TIME WISDOM IN THE PLANETARY CRISIS
Does Maya time wisdom have something to offer our present planetary crisis? Yes – profoundly.
In the Anthropocene, where human activity disturbs and fractures planetary rhythms, we urgently need models that re-synchronise us with the living biosphere and the deep-time legacy of the Earth. The combination of solar calendar Macewal Q’ij and the ritual calendar Chol Q’ij provide with exquisite precision timing of daily and annual cycles according to both agricultural seasons and celestial movements.
Every temporal element – day, month, year – has a name, a story, and a purpose. Such intergenerational time wisdom creates continuity that is sustainable, regenerative and capable of evolving from its traditional root into present relevance.
Cyclical ritual time inherently contains sacred pauses: at the end of one cycle and the beginning of another, the transition is honoured both inwardly and outwardly. These thresholds of stillness and slowing down help us resist the extraction and exhaustion of mechanical clock time. By attuning ourselves to the rhythms of the day, the seasons, and other more subtle or grand cycles of change, we deepen both ecological literacy and the ethical imagination of our future.
The Maya Long Count can orient our consciousness toward deep-time thinking and action, enabling us to imagine futures not only decades, but millennia ahead, guided by the integrity of an ethical horizon and the inclusive orientation of planetary time-wisening.
In the Chol Q’ij, each day is revered as a unique gift, a messenger carrying a specific message and energetic influence. Every day is a teacher. This sacredness of days invites us to live our time consciously, intentionally, and responsibly – also at the planetary scale. It offers an antidote to the wasting and commodification of time that characterise monochronic and rushed linear time consumption.
The Maya’s polyrhythmic calendrics and Chol Q’ij as daily practice restore meaning to temporality and can foster planetary citizenship and planetary empathy as expanded sensitivity of temporal attunement, helping humans to find their rightful place within the cosmic order.
Maya calendar wisdom can open our thinned and narrow linear timeline, offering generous threads for a more ecological weaving of times: a wiser, more multidimensional, life-honouring way to live each day. It can help us remember that we inhabit not only within the fleeting history of humanity, but a far greater cosmic story.
In the Maya cosmovision, time is not an arrow sharply aimed at a single target, but a living spiral – undulating, pulsing, breathing. It has a heartbeat and a many-faced consciousness. Its movement calls us to participate: to shape from time something sacred and enduring, in honour of past and future generations.
HOME SPIRAL
Within this spiral of times, my own task and calling have become clear. As a non-indigenous Maya daykeeper living in the Nordic lands, I have travelled a long path of practice, in slow seasonal spirals and yearly growth rings.
At the end of July came the anniversary of my entry into the Aj Q’ij path: nine years since I began the deep study of diverse Maya calendars integral to the responsibilities of a daykeeper.
Only now do I feel ready to publish my insights into Maya Time Wisdom in books form, in a way that honours the breadth, depth, and significance of this millennial lineage and the gift of its multi-calendar system for our era.
In spiral of times, in the spacious heart of Finnish summer, the material of decades took shape as a book series. The books will be available both in English and Finnish, illustrated with my own photographs, drawings and paintings.
Now I rejoice – here I am, in my new cosmic address. I continue, carrying the fruits of a joyful literary summer, along my path as a independent artist-researcher…