Richard J. Foster - Learning Humility: A Year of Searching for a Vanishing Virtue

Thoughts about writing on the subject of humility keep pressing in on me. If I am going to use the calendar year as the organizing principle for this project, I think I would prefer to use one of the Native American calendars rather than using the traditional names for the months... January, February, etc. Their intentional rootedness in the natural world is a welcome departure from the scattered, patchwork nature of todays social rhythms.

All of the Native American calendars have their merits; however, I like the Lakota Moon Calendar best, especially its close connection to the earth. There are two differences between the Latin/Gregorian and the Lakota calendars to be aware of. The most obvious difference is that the Lakota calendar is divided into thirteen moons (of twenty-eight days) rather than the twelve months we are acquainted with in the Latin/Gregorian calendar. Hence, there is a rough (though not exact) correspondence to the months most of us would recognize. Second, the Lakota calendar (like most Native American calendars) begins with spring since spring symbolizes the start of a new year through the birth of new plant and animal life. Instead, I will begin with winter and The Hard Moon, which roughly corresponds to January in the Latin/Gregorian calendar. This is when the idea of studying the topic of humility first came to me.

The Lakota are the northern plains people, and, while a part of my personal background is Ojibwa (my paternal grandmother, who died before I was born, was Native AmericanOjibwa; also called Chippewa, self-named Anishinaabe), I find the Lakota calendar most attractive to me. Perhaps learning more about the culture that gave rise to it will yield some interesting insights. The reverence in Native American cultures for creation contrasts with a contemporary culture that presumes it can engineer human society to achieve more and better.