Losar the Tibetan New Year

Remembering That the World Is Alive

My Regular Pagan Holiday Post

“During Losar, the Tibetan celebration of the New Year, we did not drink champagne. Instead, we went to the local spring to offer gratitude. We made offerings to the nagas, the water beings who awaken and sustain the water element in that place. We made smoke offerings to the spirits of the surrounding land. Beliefs and practices like these arose long ago and are often dismissed in the West as primitive. But they are not projections of fear onto nature. They come from direct, lived experience—by sages and ordinary people alike—of the sacred presence of the elements within us and around us. These we call earth, water, fire, air, and space.”
— Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Bon lama

The pagan holiday of Imbolc coincides with Losar, the Tibetan New Year—an observance older than Buddhism itself and rooted in Tibet’s indigenous relationship with land, weather, animals, and time. Losar’s rituals arose before Indian and Chinese influence, shaped instead by mountains, winds, springs, and the deep listening of people who understood the world as alive.

Losar is celebrated according to the Tibetan lunisolar calendar, which follows both moon and sun and adjusts itself to the breathing of the seasons. Months are added when necessary so that time does not drift away from frost, thaw, planting, and return. The calendar has a sixty-year cycle weaving twelve animals with five elements—Wood, Fire, Earth, Iron, and Water—each year a particular conversation between forces. In February 2026, Losar begins the Female Fire Horse year (2153), a year of movement, heat, and untamed momentum. The festival lasts fifteen days, with the first three devoted to renewal, protection, and blessing.

Before the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, Losar opened with dawn ceremonies at Namgyal Monastery, where the Dalai Lama and senior lamas made offerings to Palden Lhamo, fierce guardian of the land and the Dharma. After exile and occupation, monasteries were destroyed and public ritual suppressed. Yet Losar did not disappear. It moved into exile, into kitchens and courtyards, into memory and breath. In Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama continues to offer blessings, while Tibetans everywhere keep faith with the spirits of place—even when the place itself is inaccessible.

How do we observe Imbolc?

By remembering that the world is alive—and responding accordingly.

As we witness the brutal ICE raids in Minnesota, we feel the rupture in the web of relations. Bodies are dragged from homes; families are torn from their ecosystems of care, citizens are murdered. ICE has been run out of Maine where it targeted Somali communities after arresting 200 people and sending them to concentration camps. These acts violate not only the Constitution but the deeper laws of reciprocity that make life possible.

So we act.

We speak to our representatives and demand the defunding of ICE.
We write postcards, calling neighbors back into civic responsibility.
We organize to protect our town if the violence arrives here. The North Bay Rapid Response Network provides a 24-hour hotline to immigrants facing a raid by federal immigration agents, dispatches trained legal observers to the raid location, provides legal defense to affected communities, and offers accompaniment to impacted people and families following a raid.

We protest, along with our community and neighbors.

We put loving kindness out in all directions for the benefit of all beings.
And we plan our gardens for the coming year—because tending soil, saving seed, and preparing for planting are acts of allegiance to life itself.

Resistance, like ritual, is a way of keeping faith with the land, the waters, and one another.