Today is the Spring Equinox. This means that the daytime and nighttime are of approximately equal duration all over the planet. Our ancestors, living fully in nature could eavesdrop this moment of shift from longer nighttime to longer daytime. But we notice it too, don’t we? Don’t we feel that the sun rises earlier and sets later? Don’t we sense the change in the temperature? Or the swallows in the sky? The song of the birds loud and cheerful? The flowers blooming massively? The sweetness of the air? We may not calculate the exact moment of the equinox, but we feel it when it’s here, because we are nature too.
The equinox signals the beginning of the Spring. Our ancestors used to celebrate and honor this moment, as the transition from Winter to Spring, from Darkness to Light, from Death to Rebirth, from Melancholy to Joy, Slow rhythm existence to Fast rhythm existence, Introspection to Outward-spection, Imagination to Creation.
Nature rebirths itself and for thousands of years is not afraid to go through this transformation, to go through the darkness and cold of the Winter, to slow down its pace, to stay still, to allow some unnecessary parts to get rotten and decomposed. Well why do we human hesitate to do the same? I have this feeling that we desperately push away “death”, postponing and postponing it. I am not talking about the physical death here. I am talking about the transformation the psycho-spiritual death provides.
Michael Meade (author, mythologists and story-teller) says that in order to fully live we don’t need to die, but a part of us needs to die. And this parts of us is something that keeps us behind from our own (and thus collective) growth: a bad habit, a well-established behavior pattern that doesn’t serve us or our community, an immature way of thinking, a rotten believe, the painful way we see ourselves, the malign way we see the others, etc.
When we allow this part of ours to die, we then rebirth, we enter again the light, we grow, we feel the joy, we bloom, we root ourselves even more, we speed up and we put our wildest dreams into practice. Of course,
this process will be repeated again and again, but every year – just like in nature- we achieve evolution.
We are nature too. Even if we don’t follow exactly the seasons’ cycle, there will be moments in which a psycho-spiritual Winter will come upon us. Perhaps we are living one right now? Perhaps we are given an
invitation to stop, slow down, listen to ourselves, reflect on what does not serve us and let those parts of ourselves which do not serve our souls die. Then I believe, we will have a collective human Equinox.
In the meantime, let’s celebrate the current Equinox. I celebrated it last night by singing dozens of times the song “Wild mountain thyme”. How are you planning to celebrate it?
Above a photo of our pomegranate tree which is entering the Spring.
Eleni Michail
