It’s the vernal equinox. Today’s the start of spring in the Gregorian calendar that everyone now uses, though it was mid-spring in other European calendars.
Funny thing about calendars and climate change: for many, many years, the Gregorian telling of things seemed to make most sense. Increasingly now, the older one does. It’s definitely feeling like mid-spring here, and the plants and trees seem to agree with me on this.
I mowed our lawn yesterday. I call it a “lawn,” but every year my husband and I take space away from it and put something else there. So, what was once an expanse of grass is now full of raised beds, wooden walkways for his aging mother, and wooden trellises for our obsession with vines of all sorts. This year, there will be even less “lawn,” soon to be displaced by a greenhouse.
Yesterday, I mowed what little grass remains, aware the entire time of my mother-in-law watching me and smiling. For years, the mowing was her thing, as were the raised beds full of lettuces, potatoes, leeks, garlic, and beans. Those vegetables and plots are still her things, of course. I’ve now got my own plot, which is why we have less lawn.
I now do the mowing of our rapidly disappearing lawn. Though I think she was at first worried I wouldn’t do it right, she seems quite happy about her son-in-law, thirty-four years younger than she is, doing it instead.
All the plants here are certain life has returned, so it must be true.
Life seems not just to return, but also to change on the vernal equinox, regardless of what calendar you use. The Christians originally believed today was the birthday of creation, 25 March in the Julian calendar. For a long time, most of them were also certain Mary conceived Jesus on that day, though a few early church fathers argued that he was actually born on the birthday of the world, instead. Those detractors had a better case than the others, since shepherds couldn’t possibly be “watching their flocks by night” in the sharply cold arid December nights of Palestine.
It didn’t really matter and was anyway impossible to figure out when Jesus was born or conceived, of course. This was Origen of Alexandria’s point, and he was quite upset Christians kept trying to set a date. Though he lost his argument, it’s worth noting why it all bothered him so much.
It was a pagan habit to make the “below” match the “above,” to find astrological correlations for what happened on earth. The “pagan” majority of the Christians won out, though, especially because they needed desperately to displace the intractably popular high feast days of the winter solstice: Saturnalia and Sol Invictus. If Mary conceived on the vernal equinox (again, 25 March in the Julian calendar), then Jesus would have born nine months later on the winter Solstice (25 December). That would mean they could keep the old festivals and just re-brand them with a different god.
Despite being impossible to verify and also very likely an intentional lie, their scheme is really quite poetic. On the equinox, the virgin receives the divine seed which grows into a radical change in the world, just as the earth receives seeds which grow into wholly new things that have not themselves lived before.
Just as I’d hardly be able to convince myself that there is only one seed in the world, I don’t believe there’s only one god. So, there are many divine seeds, and it occurs to me that at least one seems to take root in my soul each spring equinox.
In fact, giving an account of my life would be impossible without noting that many — and probably a majority — of the most important decisions I’ve made in my 47 years have been during the tide of this equinox.
Some twelve years ago, I wrote in a journal during this equinox that I needed to leave the life I had built for more than a decade, to follow the wild visions haunting my waking and sleeping. I remember trembling when I wrote those words, but also feeling profound relief, finally submitting to a nagging, relentless call.
Again on this equinox a few years later, informed by all I’d seen because of that decision, I officially launched the online journal for the publisher I still run, Gods&Radicals / Ritona Press. Forty-three titles later, it’s still going, and soon to double in size.
Eight years ago, yet again during this same tide, I moved to France without any certainty of where I’d actually live or how I’d actually stay. I kept pulling The Fool card out of my tarot deck to stare at it, just so I could have some external witness of how wildly reckless — yet utterly essential — it all felt.
Then, five years ago, I joined my first gym. At that point, I was in a terrifyingly abusive relationship with a man upon whom my residence permit fully depended. Working out became the only way out of all that, a path to feeling myself a body again and the only escape from the soul-crushing horror into which I’d become trapped.
Then, there was the next equinox, four years ago. Finally out of that situation and living with my sister in Luxembourg, the entire world suddenly shut down. A pandemic had come, we were told, and thus the wise and all knowing governments needed to make it illegal to meet with humans you didn’t live with. Here they made it also illegal to travel outside the country, illegal to bury your dead, illegal to work out in a gym, illegal to worship your god in a church, and illegal to be anywhere without a mask.
That’s when I made yet another wild decision, accepting yet another divine seed into the ground of me. I’d just started dating a man a few weeks before, and it was now against the law for us to meet. “We’d be breaking the law,” he said to me, “but you could come stay with me if you can find a way to get here.”
So I did. It’s normally just a one hour bike ride from my sister’s home to his, but it took me much longer. I had to take every back route I could find, sometimes carrying the bicycle my sister let me borrow through muddy forests. At a few places, I had to backtrack to avoid police controls interrogating everyone they saw about where they were going and whether they had authorization to do so. Eventually, four hours later, I arrived, and stayed with him illegally through the “confinement.”
If you’ve been reading me for the last few years, you know how that all turned out. And you also know about another of those wild spring equinox decisions: marrying that man. Really, the best decision of my life, and one that, in retrospect, was only possible because of all the other equinox decisions preceding it.
Of course, I didn’t actually know the weight of any those acts when they happened. They seemed only mere choices to make, directions to travel, uncertain beginnings, The Fool drawn laughingly from a tarot deck
Like seeds, I think, sown then forgotten until they sprout, and then grow, and then become. So I don’t yet know the weight of anything I am doing during this equinox tide, only that every divine seed eventually manifests itself into the world.
May your decisions likewise bear fruit.
—Rhyd Wildermuth
PS: I needed to delay the start date of the course on my book, Being Pagan. It now starts this Sunday, 24 March, which means there is still time to enroll if you’d like to join us.
Happy Equinox Rhyd!
As a Southern Hemispherean, I notice a tendency of some Northern Hemisphereans to speak as if their seasons are universal. (Here, we are going into Autumn.) Weirdly, too, in the Antipodes Northern Festivals such as Christmas and Easter are celebrated arse-backwards, in the opposite seasons to their original ones, which I feel is bad magic. One thing I love about Equinoxes is that they are a kind of meeting in the middle: the Northern and Southern Hemisphere briefly equalise, with a mirrored set of day and night lengths, before swinging away from each other again.
Do you have any thoughts on Daylight Saving Time?
I grew up in Indiana where we didn't do it for the first 16 years or so of my life. I hate it and it messes me up. But I was thinking about one of your essays recently where you talked about clock time and capitalism having to inure us to clock time...and then I realized that part of the reason it messes me up so much is actually because I am so inured to the clock. If I were in sync with the Sun then it wouldn't matter so much what the clock said.