Quote:February is a busy month this year. In fact, a single week is packed with celebrations and solemn holidays. We have a smorgasbord of religious and quasi-religious events converging in a single seven-day orgy of ritual purification and renewal.

It all begins on the 15th, with Maha Shivaratri, a major Hindu festival dedicated to Lord Shiva, observed annually on the 14th night of the dark fortnight (waning moon) in the month of Phalguna (usually February–March) of the Saka calendar. “The Great Night of Shiva” is one of meditation, fasting, and spiritual vigilance commemorating Shiva’s cosmic dance (Tandava), symbolizing the triumph of consciousness over ignorance and stillness over chaos. This is when the Abhishekam ritual bathing of the Shiva lingam with milk, water, honey, ghee, or bilva leaves takes place.

The Hindu holiday is followed immediately by Lunar, or Chinese New Year 4723 of the Mandarin calendar, which kicks off two weeks of eating, drinking and making merry. My kind of holiday. Everything turns red and gold, and vast amounts of cash change hands in little red envelopes called hóngbāo, or angpao here locally. Avoid the number 4 and always use crisp uncirculated notes.

This year is Yang Red Bǐng Wǔ (丙午), or Fire Horse. This is going to be one wild year! You see, the Horse is already a yang sign, and by luck of the draw the Celestial Root and Earthly Stem for this year are yang and fire, and fire is a red symbol. So basically, we get a double whammy on the yang-red aspect, and who can’t use a big red yang every now and then?

Maximum yang implies fast, volatile, expansive, restless energy. Fire years emphasize heat, visibility, passion, and exposure—nothing stays hidden for long. The Horse brings:

• Speed and volatility
  
• Bold action, impulsive decisions
  
• Revolutions, uprisings, market swings
  
• Charismatic leaders and spectacular flameouts
  
• Innovation paired with instability
  

Seems to me this already describes 2026 to a T. This will not be a year for bureaucracies, rigid hierarchies, risk-averse personalities, or long, slow consensus processes. Could be a good year for us free thinkers, though.

It’s worth noting that the American, French and Cultural Revolutions all overlapped Horse years, with major momentum shifts to the revolutionaries. This might explain some of the things going on with Xi Jinping and the Trump administration. Just sayin’.

On a practical basis, it means that I have to help Mrs. FarSide with a top-down house cleaning, bathing the cats, cutting my hair, and buying a new red shirt that, in all likelihood, I will never wear again.

All this festivity is immediately followed on the 18th, by Ash Wednesday and the beginning of the solemn month of Lent in Christendom. The day is marked by Christians getting a cross of ashes on their foreheads with the words, “Remember, man, that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” It’s a rather bleak admonition to contemplate one’s mortality and re-assess priorities in the period leading up to Easter. All of this comes from very ancient pagan rituals of public mortification and goddess worship.

Also on the 18th, or is it the 20th—for some reason Islam can never quite calculate the moment of the New Moon ahead of time—is the beginning of Ramadan, the Muslim month commemorating the period when the Qur’an was first revealed to the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him). It’s obviously not the precise month of revelation, since Ramadan moves around year to year, based on the lunar calendar.

Ramadan is about discipline, self-restraint, and spiritual renewal. The aim is not deprivation for its own sake, but moral clarity—training the will to master appetite, anger, and ego. The faithful abstain from eating, drinking, smoking, and sex during daylight hours for 28 days, culminating in Eid al-Fitr (Idul Fitri locally), which is a bit like Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter all rolled into one.

In some parts, folks take the admonition against “wine” in the Qur’an literally, meaning other intoxicants are just peachy keen (see arak and hashish). Sex is also strictly defined as between a male and a female. I’ll leave the readers to infer here whatever they wish.

It reminds me of what my aunt told the former Mrs. FarSide, concerning the lack of booze at a wedding party: “Honey, we’re all Baptists. We don’t drink in front of each other.”

So, a busy month and year ahead. A year of excess and volatility begun amid abstinence and deprivation. Talk about your split personalities. In just the first month and a half, we’ve already witnessed markets flying into the stratosphere, then plunging into the Abyss. We’ve seen dark secrets revealed. We’re seeing political unrest flaring up here and there. All in all, the trends seem clear for the coming year of the Horse.

It’s rare to have so many important cultural events converge like this, and the last Fire Horse year was 1966, a volatile year, so chaos seems to be in the cards this year. Batten down, buckle up, and don’t forget your goggles. As the shrunken head said in the Harry Potter series, “Eet’s gonna be a bompy ride!”

Si munds vult dicipi, ergo dicipitatur.

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Our cinematic feast of the day is a pair of films from the same director and creative team. The first is Baraka (1992), and the second is Samsara (2011), both directed by Ron Fricke. They are beautifully shot and assembled, showing the human experience across time and place, with just regular folks as the stars. This is cinema as high art.