A Pattern in Time

Stepping into the Circle of 2026

“There is a pattern. There are lines drawn between the stars, and lines drawn between places, and lines drawn between people, and lines linking all three.

We do not always understand our part in the working out of the pattern. And you see, it is possible for people to work against the pattern — to tangle the lines of love between the stars and people and places. The pattern is as perfect as a spiderweb and as delicate.”

— Madeleine L’Engle, An Acceptable Time

I recently re-read the A Wrinkle in Time quintet. They’re incredible books. It’s funny though, even as someone who adores mythology, studies it, teaches it, and believes in it as a conveyor of the deepest truth, I found myself thinking: Why would I read these books? They’re for kids! I read them when I was in middle school! But Ganga Devi Braun, who I love and respect, highly recommended A Swiftly Tilting Planet (the fourth in the series), so I decided to give it a try. Suffice to say, I was so taken with it, that I read the other two books on either side of it.

And our planet is indeed swiftly tilting on its 365.25-day journey around the sun — a journey that finds me sitting at a desk in a friend’s home in Northern New Jersey on a day we call “New Year’s Day,” in a year we are now calling 2026. But this is a threshold that is entirely human-created. New year’s day could have been any day in earth’s cycle around the sun. It could have been on the equinox or the solstice, but at some point it was decided that it would be now, in a solar calendar that is also human-created. The universe operates on scales of billions of years, and the change from one human-defined year to the next is an instantaneous, unnoticeable blip in cosmic time. The earth's orbit doesn't restart today; it keeps going as it has and will. The new year is an arbitrary point that becomes important, even sacred, when we make it so.

As Jews, we live in two calendars at once — lunar and solar. I joked to a friend that this new year, unlike Rosh Hashanah, we can celebrate outside of synagogue. (Yes, Rabbis-to-be can still make that joke.) But it can be disorienting to live in multiple calendars, multiple dimensions, multiple times. For me, identifying the patterns creates a roadmap and enables navigation between these different frameworks.

Unlike the new Jewish year of 5786, the new Gregorian year of 2026 is one I will write out every day and see almost every day, making it more accessible. Rosh Hashanah is a powerful time spiritually and we have many rituals and prayers to accompany that threshold. New year’s eve doesn’t have the shofar blast or Avinu Malkeinu. In my younger years, it was just another excuse to get drunk. But the fact that the Gregorian new year doesn’t have a defined ritual tool box, opens it up for whatever we might want to create, and there can be much depth and intentionality in that.

Last night, my friends and I watched the Andrea Gibson documentary, Come See Me in the Good Light, at turns absolutely heart-breaking and indelibly inspiring. It was moving to watch someone live for so long and with such graceful integrity and awareness on their own threshold, between life and death, known and unknown. As 2025 dies away and 2026 is born, with Andrea Gibson no longer in their body to write the poetry that so many thousands came to count on for its simple seeing, devotion to the beauty of life in all its ragged edges — perhaps we are being asked what is dying and being born within us? The highlight of the documentary for me, besides witnessing the beautiful love between Andrea and their partner Megan, was this moment where Andrea’s friend is describing calling them during a really hard time. Andrea invited their friend to experience everything she was feeling — sadness, loneliness, agitation — as love.

What if you called all of it love? They asked. Hmm, what if we did?

That brings me back to the pattern that is emerging in the year we are calling 2026, on this day we are calling “new.” I write pattern here and not intention, although I know intention-setting can be a powerful practice on these kind of thresholds, I’m allowing that to be subsumed in the recognition of a pattern and our place in it.

The pattern I see is a circle — a ma’agal/ מַעְגָל. A circle that can hold it all: the human-created-made-sacred, last year’s intentions missed or kept, the meaning continually revealed beneath the surface of absolutely everything, the poet, the lover, the teacher, the friend, the one who is unsure but trying anyway, the tears held back and finally released, the song lifted up to the rafters and stretching out its limbs like fireworks.

The ma’agal enables everything to be equidistant from the center — no hierarchy. The ma’agal spins its way through space, everything and nothing; receiving and giving back, contracting and expanding. The ma’agal births new life and love. The ma’agal doesn’t care how old you are, what your politics are, how many times you’ve been silenced or pushed aside, or how many times you’ve forgotten how ineffably expansive is your true nature. It simply repeats, come on in, you are welcome here.

The ma’agal is a dance we are invited into; a dance the world needs right now. According to Reb Nachman of Breslov, in the future, the tzadikim or righteous ones, will form a great circle dance, and the One of Being will sit in the center. Each person will point inward and say: “This is our Creator.” But as Madeleine L’Engle points out again and again in the A Wrinkle in Time series, time is not linear, we only perceive it that way. So the future is now — on this day in the orbit that we choose to call a new year. A

And none of us can afford anymore not to at least aspire to be tzadikim. An impossible task maybe, but the ma’agal doesn’t care about impossible. It cares about being willing.

Lines are important to the pattern too, and useful. Lines of teacher/student, lines of law that protect a society and all of its members. But the ma’agal has no top or bottom, no beginning or end. The ma’agal is radical equality, nearness, and emergence. The dance of the ma’agal belongs to all of us and we belong to it — earth mother with her prayer shawl of sky and clouds. Moon mother with a belly full of dreams.

This is the pattern I see for 2026, and now we enter into it together. It will not be neat with creased edges. But in its messiness is truth, shalom, and enough compassion to keep all our hands clasped until the dance is through.

(It’s never through.)

“The universe is a universe. Everything is connected by the love of the Creator.”

— Madeleine L’Engle, An Acceptable Time

As always, thanks for reading,

Ariel Hendelman