When does a year begin? Or end?

       I last posted to this blog in October when I was inspired by a sunrise on my way to a local coffee shop.  I titled the piece "what I saw today" with the intention, by day's end, of posting a number of photos I took while wandering around town.  It the time, we had poor Internet service with such low bandwidth that I gave up on uploading the remaining photos and the thoughts they inspired.   I still have the photos on file, but not necessarily the thoughts.  I may yet add the photos, but at the turn of the year, I have other things in mind.
      I set out on Monday to look for wintery photo ops.  I'm a springtime photographer at heart, so I thought of it as a personal challenge to find beauty in what most people would call a dreary day. Thus, the above photo of a first-season Mullein covered with frost. A nearby Mullein (photo below) was not quite so thoroughly covered, so evidence of its greenness was visible. My plan was to write on New Year's Day about the question in today's title. 

      Calendars were invented by humans, but the the seasonal revolution of Earth around the Sun had been going on long before hum ans came along.  The beginnings and endings of years that are acknowledged by our culture are political in origin, and history of our calendar is well known. However, it seems to me that, to paraphrase Alfred Korzybski, that we have come to "confuse the map with the territory." I have always related more strongly to the significance of the winter solstice (December 22 in 2019) than to New Year's Day.
      An ancient party called Saturnalia celebrated the beginning of the lengthening of days (at least in the Northern Hemisphere) involved  lot of drinking - celebratory drinking, thankful drinking. As compared to current trends on New Year's Eve of drinking, more often than not, to forget things or to give  oneself a respite from the strain of appearing to be moral.
      So, this leads me to ponder other questions.  When does a year end? Or a decade? When does a life begin and end? Again, I find the life cycle of the Mullein to be instructive.
      During the first season of life following the germination of a seed, Mullein grows a whorl of soft, fuzzy, green leaves that doesn't get more than a few inches tall.  Toward the end of that first season, the leaves seem to die, but life goes on beneath the surface. [Mark the spot.] During the second season, a new whorl of green leaves emerges, but in a matter of a few weeks a tall stalk grows from the center and by mid-summer can be a good deal taller than me and bear a cluster of small yellow flowers. Toward the end of that second summer of life, millions of tiny seeds fall (or get eaten by birds) and the entire plant seems to die.  We call such plants biennials. However, the dry, brown stalk may persist for several more years. To me, this statuesque, 6-foot-tall stalk still has life in the same sense that any inanimate object, like a piece of furniture, has a life.

      A few miles further along on my New Year's exploration, I was enthralled, as I had been man times before, by stopping to gaze at Dog Rock (known by many other names, not all pleasant) and contemplating beginnings and endings orders of magnitude greater than those of the Mullein.

      Then, I see myself as somewhere in between.  I'm not sure if I identify more with the green, flower-bearing Mullein in its second summer, or the Mullein that has dropped its seeds by the end of its second summer, or, having raised five children and possibly nearing retirement, perhaps I'm closer to that stalk of Mullein that could be three or more years old and will persist until the ravages of winter or CalTrans take it down. Like the Mullein, and many other so-called weeds I love, I hope to get the last laugh. Here's to seeking renewal in the new year.