Born on the Day Out of Time

Red Skywalker

Several years ago, I was researching the Mayan civilization and came across an article on the Mayan calendar and end of time prophecy. That article had links to Mayan fortune telling/astrology sites, which I followed, curious soul that I am. I discovered that I was born on the Day out of Time, according to the Mayan calendar, and that my birth year made me a Red Rhythmic Skywalker.

The Day Out of Time (DOOT henceforth) falls at the end of the calendar year and is the day between the end of the last year and the beginning of the new year. DOOT is always 25 July, regardless of the day of the week. It was a day of celebration, of blood sacrifices, of ritual and thoughtful contemplation of the coming year. It was a high holy day of much religious significance.

I thought at the time of this discovery that being born on a day which did not exist in the time line of a historically important culture such as the Mayan's spoke volumes about my own sense of being outside the norm. I liked the idea that I was not really a part of this world, but was of the galactic, cosmic, spiritual plane instead. My mother was forever saying that I had my head in the clouds and that I lived in a world of my own, which sounded like a criticism when she said it, but maybe she knew something I wouldn't understand until I stumbled across the Mayan calendar site.

What really thrilled me was learning that my birth symbol, my destiny kin, is that of a Skywalker, one who explores space. The day Alan Shepard flew into space in May of 1961, and fell back down again whole and relatively unchanged (except for being the center of an historic moment), was the day I decided I wanted to be an astronaut. For years, when I was much younger, I would lie outside at night when the weather was good and try to count the stars. I wondered how many of those distant shifting, twinkling lights were suns, like ours, around which planets, like ours, rotated. It was the fifties, when Buck Rogers and the 21st century, when The Day the Earth Stood Still (and similar cinematic adventures) were their most popular. Sky King's sometimes-ditzy-pilot-niece Penny was my heroine (six-shooters Dale Evans and Annie Oakley were second and third, respectively).

I was not yet 14 when I decided I would become an astronaut. I told one person, a friend at school, of my ambition, and he laughed so hard I thought he was going to choke to death. He couldn't wait to tell his buddies that a GIRL from the housing projects, who couldn't even pay for her own lunch, who wore baggy, ill-fitting hand-me-downs and had rotted teeth, this GIRL!!! thought she was going to become an astronaut. What wanton hubris, to quote my favorite movie character. I didn't tell anyone else, especially not my mother, who might actually have understood, but I couldn't risk being ridiculed again.

When Sally Ride went into orbit, she carried with her the dreams of a once-13-year-old girl, who never got over wanting to be an astronaut.

Nowadays, the space I explore is more likely to be the space between my ears, what makes me who I am, or the wide-open spaces of America (and the rest of the world, if I live long enough). But I have my Mayan destiny kin, my astral character, to remind me that I am a Skywalker, not entirely unlike Sally and Penny, or even Buck, Jean Luc, Number One and Warf. I am an explorer, born on the Day Out of Time in 1947, a bridger of two worlds; in a world of my own making, whose head is sometimes (thank God!) in the clouds, counting stars.

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(For the person who asked me a few months ago about the name Skywalker, in the title of my blog, now you know.)
(c) 2009 Martha McLemore