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| Living by Proxy: Still travelling in a sense with some help from others. |
I was becoming more and more enamoured with the concept of Ramadan because it had already taught me so much. In addition to turning me into a morning person, my pre-dawn walks were slowly instructing me in the geography of the night sky.
I had the luck of starting my first Ramadan in September 2007. At this time the two bright stars signifying the heads of 'the twins' (the constellation Gemini) were easily recognised in the east just before sunrise. As the month wore on, I saw how Gemini gradually rose up to be replaced by Leo on the eastern horizon. This observation could be classed as epiphanic in itself, but it was just the beginning.
From what Hebbat had told me, in the Islamic calendar a year is counted as 12 lunar months (Ramadan being the 9th). Because a lunar month is one or two days shorter than a calendar month, the dates of Ramadan shift and it starts about 12 days earlier each year. Although this has some terrifying implications as Ramadan moves through the seasons (Hebbat had related her stories of Ramadan in the long, scorching days of the Australian summer), there are also some benefits. I realised that if I did the Ramadan the following year, I would observe Gemini even lower in the sky and have to wait longer for Leo to rise up below it. As I'm a very slow learner, I figured this could be one way to finally get a grasp on all the constellations as each year there would be a slightly different part of the sky to focus on. Furthermore I calculated that if I wanted to once again practice Ramadan with Gemini as I first observed it, I would have to wait about 33 years.
Although 33 years seemed like an impossibly long time to be planning into the future, it was humbling and exciting to feel part of a larger scheme. An appreciation of the subtle difference between the solar and lunar cycles would have been beyond me before - I have enough trouble remembering that the earth is round, and conceiving that it is not the sun moving past us everyday, but actually us moving relative to the sun. So brutal as the discipline of Ramadan is, its great advantage is that it makes everyone who participates a scientist. It educates you to this natural cycle by making you part of it. In this way, even slow and forgetful learners like myself have a chance of really understanding things.
