In the north it’s become fall and in the south it’s become spring, but in either case, yesterday was the day when the light and dark were even. Ahhhh…the peace of balance…the pause where everything is in harmony and equal…the bliss of a moment between this and that…the complete havoc wrought by everything being upended and beginning to move in a different direction…the transition which puts everything in a blender and you just have to hold on…the disjointedness that comes from having just gotten into the rhythm from the last frakkin’ time everything changed and now it’s different again…
Everyone experiences these balance days differently because balance doesn’t mean a cease-fire, it means “both/and”. You know, the Yin/Yang symbol has both white and black, both the saturated complete fullness of everything connected with the empty potential of anything and a drop of both in each other. Note that putting the two together doesn’t make a big grey blob of indistinguishable mashed up goo but a beautiful dance of interdependence one with the other, each made more distinguishable by their union, not less. The equinoxes are like this as well. I like to think of them as magical because they describe the in between spaces, the points in between this and that. They are both season and neither, the place where time is made incredibly present to us because they are a specific date and even a holiday for some and yet irrelevant as they delineate timeless presence.
For others these holidays emphasize the winds of change and transition, the disruption of harmony, complacency, stagnation. They are movement without distraction, change without amelioration. They call out specifically the transition from this to that, between now and no longer then, from potential into being. How we experience these changes is somewhat a band-aid issue: if you have any say in the matter then you get to choose rip it off or slowly peel and if you don’t then the universe and circumstances and all others involved culminate in making the process sudden or considered and of course there are plenty of speeds in between and no one says that any particular process has to stick to just one. *see what I did there? stick…it’s a band-aid joke…*
So as we enter into this new season, along with all the messages about “Yay! It’s a new season. Aren’t we all glad we survived the last one, are sorry to see it go, isn’t this new one glorious?!!!” it would be good to realize that there’s more going on than just plant life and holidays and it affects you directly. If nothing else, take a moment to check in…or wake up…or get a new fire extinguisher for all the fires going on in your life. You’re supposed to get those serviced once a quarter you know. ?