The last page of a notebook. The final evening of a holiday. The thirty-first of December, when the old calendar comes down and the new one, still blank, goes up on its nail.
Endings rarely feel clean. There's always a little of the beginning already inside them.
People have been drawing that feeling for more than three thousand years. They drew it as a snake.
A circle with no start
The ouroboros, from the Greek for "tail-devourer", is a serpent curled into a ring, biting its own tail. One of the earliest known examples comes from the tomb of Tutankhamun, in the 14th century BC: two snakes coiled around a figure, one at the head, one at the feet, holding the beginning and the end of time together.
The drawing below is younger, but just as strange. It comes from a Greek alchemical text known as the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, "the gold-making of Cleopatra", written by an alchemist rather than the queen. The text probably goes back to Alexandria in the third century; the oldest copy we have was made around a thousand years ago.
Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, ouroboros, from a 10th-century copy of a Greek alchemical text. Biblioteca Marciana, Venice
Inside the circle are three words: ἓν τὸ πᾶν, "the all is one". Half the snake is black, half is pale. Day and night, ending and beginning, the same creature.
Why it still speaks to us
Alchemists weren't only trying to make gold. They were fascinated by transformation: how one thing becomes another without ever quite disappearing. The ouroboros was their shorthand for it.
It's a gentler way to think about the end of a year. Not a wall you crash into, but a curve you're already travelling along.
A small ritual for the turn of the year
- Take a sheet of paper and draw a circle. It doesn't need to be neat. Leave a tiny gap at the top, where the snake's mouth meets its tail.
- Just inside the circle, on the right, write three things this year gave you. Small things count: a walk, a book, a conversation.
- On the left, write three things you'd like to carry into the next one.
- Look at the gap. Notice that the two sides almost touch.
- Close your eyes for a few breaths and let the circle stay in your mind. Then fold the paper and keep it somewhere you'll find it next December.
If this speaks to you, you might also enjoy Kairos, the Greek idea of the right moment, or choosing one word and one painting instead of resolutions.
A beginning of your own
The First Letter is a short sensory meditation on receiving a letter, with a sample of our magazine "(meditating) On Art". It's free, and it makes a quiet first page.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi