I was really stuck on what to do for the sundial project at first, and had two phrases looping in my head and no direction:
- light as a way to know the world
- sundial showing a moment in time (as opposed to passage of time)
And it wasn't until I read an excerpt from Jay Griffith's A Sideways Look at Time that I knew what I wanted to do: a moondial instead of a sundial. I was really influenced by her passages claiming that time in nature are often cyclical, and one of the best examples of that are menstrual cycles.
So I took the liberty of going with the extended metaphor of the assignment: "anything that changes in relation to another phenomenon, and calls attention to, magnifies, or delineates that change is a cousin to the sundial". I've always been very irregular in my menstrual cycle (my cycle is typically 25-27 days so it never falls on the same weeks month to month) so I thought perhaps there'd be a pattern if I compared it to the lunar cycle since it has the same number of days per cycle.
I downloaded seven years of my menstrual data from Clue and found a javascript library called lunarphase.js to help me calculate the phase of the moon.
What I found was that I'm very irregular, even compared to the moon lol:
Which makes a lot of sense since my cycle is on average two to four days less than that of the moon's. But I was still able to identity an interesting peak right before the full moon.
(I'm not a very witchy person but I have quite a few people who are and this moon exploration is making me feel real witchy 🧙♀️)
But the quick bar chart only showed me what days I menstrated relative to the moon phase, but not relative to the previous or following cycle. So I imagined a spiral going out, with each full revolution being a lunar cycle and peaks for the days of my period:
Which was even harder to read, so I decided to animate it and really accentuate the peaks:
And here it is with (very experimental) legends, annotations, and title:
