Don't count the days.

• Position: ECOlogical Calendar - WHAT'S NEW?

A lot of people merely think of the just completed year as the number 2005 and the New Year as another ho-hum numeral, 2006. For many, it's simply add one to the old year's tally and off we go again--and the common calendar of dates in boxes tends to reinforce this monotonous routine. However, a year is not just another number--no matter what the standard Gregorian calendar says--rather, it's an entirely new relationship between a multitude of cycles and events.

How to better expand our relationship to time through an understanding of the biological world in which we thrive? The ECOlogical Calendar, illustrated by Antenna, a California-based experimental theater group, and distributed by Pomegranate Communications, is designed to reorient us to the natural environment's rhythm over the course of the four seasons and to allow us to better understand our place within this vast universe. This calendar is attractive, educational, inspiring, and enlightening, as it celebrates the change in seasons in astonishing graphics (on four heavyweight, full color, 12" x 36" panels), showing seasonally visible stars, phases of the moon in relationship to meteor showers, tides, the cycles of plenty and privation, and ratios of darkness to light. There are...