By Tracie Nichols
I have to confess, I find equinoxes gasp-worthy.
They feel like a moment of time-out-of-time twice each year, offering us a day of dynamically balanced light and dark. It always feels to me like they’re the earth’s way of creating space so we can rest and gather before moving into the next cycle of seasonal rhythms.
It’s as if the earth is teaching us the true meaning of balance.
Like what we feel when we inhale and hold a few seconds before we exhale, or awaken and pause a few moments before we burst into movement. A sweet moment of appreciation for what was, what is and what will be—all wrapped up in a sacred pause.
Even the scientific explanation seems to agree, “An equinox occurs when the plane of Earth’s Equator passes the center of the Sun. At that instant, the tilt of Earth’s axis neither inclines away from nor towards the Sun…The subsolar point crosses the equator, moving northward at the March equinox and southward at the September equinox” (emphasis mine).
Not only are we balancing between two seasons—this March equinox heralds the edge between winter and spring in the northern hemisphere, and summer and autumn for southern hemisphere ecosystems—but the hemispheres are balanced between two sides of the same phenomenon.
The everyday balance of day and night nestles into the fluid balance between seasons; nestles into the global balance of hemispheric weather patterns. Living system within living system, eternal rhythms playing out, and we have the consciousness with which to experience this in all of its complex beauty.
See what I mean? Gasp-worthy.
I can understand why so many past and current civilizations celebrate them. And why I feel a primal longing to clear space in my life on each equinox to notice. To notice the earth’s rhythms. To notice what’s moving in my own life. To notice rising ideas, insights and creative impulses in the spring, and deepening, slowing, shedding urges in the autumn. To notice what feels like the most sacred and celebratory way to mark this great cyclical pause each time it happens.
This spring, it’s with a poetic outpouring….
Exquisite Equinox
cloaked
by mist
muted sunlight glow
I squat on the ground…
inhaling
rich decay
soil dark and ready
damp cool promise
under my hand
withered peas in a line
waiting
to be pressed
into the earth
longing
for her
fingers delve
peas submerged
soil smoothed
the air is pregnant with rain
and me…
I’m pregnant
with wonder
at the courage
of the peas
in time
gentle birth
each tender leaf
pulling free
stretching sunward
suffused with strength
and me…
following where they lead
pushing through
the weight
of 53 years of
decay
shaking myself free
stretching sunward
taking the same risk
as the peas
hoping to taste
as sweet
to the world
What do you notice this March equinox? How are you feeling called to mark it’s arrival?
Photo: (Source)
Editor: Daniel Scharpenburg
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