It’s the Vernal Equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere, and the Autumnal Equinox for our friends in the Southern. Happy Equality Day, everybody!
There, I fixed it.
I have been ranting for … a couple years now about this whole Equinox binary story, and I just realized this morning that this holiday has been celebrated by thousands of peoples for tens of thousands of years, and there are thousands stories about it that we will never even know. Lost in the Mystery, but still resonating. Before agrarian times, I’m sure the stories were about migrations of animals and people to seasonal homes in more hospitable climates. And maybe some people who didn’t migrate at all saw this sky-dance in a whole different way that we can’t even imagine.
And their shamans or wise ones or witches or druids or whatever they were called made these stories up to explain what was going on. Well, okay, “made up” might be a little undiplomatic. They composed the ballad of the Equinox after meditation and trance to seek guidance, so their people would understand what was happening, and maybe so they’d perform specific ceremonies or rituals to deepen the clan or tribe’s connection to the land through this time of the year.
To keep the Hive Mind in tune with the Web Mind.
It’s astonishing to me how many people have no idea what the Equinox is, what it’s about, why we should care. We have known about them for millennia. The earliest smart people, many thousands of years ago, figured out not only that the Earth is a sphere, but that it is in orbit around the Sun, and the Moon is in orbit around the Earth. And that there are, yes indeed, other planets out there, too, in orbit around the same sun. Way way before telescopes. There are equations and diagrams expressing circumference and distance carved into rocks from 8000-10,000 years ago that are more accurate than any equation humans came up with until the last hundred or so years. Our ancestors were smart damn cookies.
Fearful and fear-mongering people hid this information, tried to kill it. Tried to keep us ignorant and in the dark, and they nearly succeeded. But sadly, the last few hundred years, which have given us penicillin and refrigerators and gas-powered engines and nuclear bombs, have not given us back our star knowledge. Oh, there are plenty of astronomers, doing good work, finding stuff out, blowing the minds of those who are fearless enough to learn from them. But the majority of people are flat out ignorant of even this one, simplest thing.
We don’t have a hive mind anymore, and all the bees are drunk.
So here’s what we know. Our Sun was born and there was an enormous cloud of debris from the explosion that began to clump together to form planets. Earth shared her orbit for a few million years with a planet we call Theia, who was about the size of Mars, slightly smaller than Earth. Inevitably, the two collided, and when two planets collide, the small one loses, so Theia was blown to smithereens, and Earth got a big chunk smashed away, and the collision knocked her 23.5 degrees off axis. The debris from the explosion eventually became the Moon, and also filled in the chunk that got smashed away from Earth’s surface. The Northern Hemisphere is a little smushed and misshapen, and quite a bit smaller than the Southern Hemisphere because of this collision.
The tilt of the axis is what gives Earth our seasons, and as we move through our orbit, the sun appears to move from a point in the South to a point in the North, and days and nights get shorter-and-longer (and vice versa) as the sun travels through that ark. The exact mid-point, the Equinox, in which you see the root of the word equal, is when day and night are exactly the same length for a hot minute. They are Equal. Equinox means Equal Night.
So what if … we celebrate Equality in all things on this day, instead of some binary thing?
The two Equinox days, Vernal and Autumnal, could be days we celebrate our interconnectedness with all things, how we’re dependent on the plants to keep producing oxygen, and they’re dependent on us to keep producing carbon dioxide. We’re dependent on the plants for all our food (even carnivores eat animals who eat plants). We’re dependent on bees and other flying pollinators for a frighteningly large percentage of the food we eat (no bees, everybody gets hungry fast). I could go on but this is already sciencey enough for one post. Point is, we’re in a web, and it’s balanced very delicately, and we are utterly dependent on the health of that balance for our own survival.
I don’t know what Nature’s criteria are for determining whether an experiment is a success or a failure. She seems to have a hell of a lot more patience than I do. The dinosaurs were around for 180 million or so years, and the only reason they got wiped out was because they were hit by an asteroid. If that hadn’t happened, Earth might be a very different place. Mammals might never have been able to get enough traction to grow these big brains that have allowed us to invent the cellular phone, New York, wars and so on. But I digress. If I was Mother Nature, I’d be dumping us in the waste bin and trying again, after only a couple hundred-thousand years. Maybe she’s trying to see if we’ll redeem ourselves. I guess that’s fair, give us another shot to get it right. (Clearly She has far more patience than I do. I would have drawn the line at kicking off and then totally ignoring a mass extinction event, but … that’s just me.)
Maybe a first step in that redemption process could be two days a year of acknowledgment of our interdependence. Two days when we admit we’re not any better than anybody else. Two days when we maybe own that we have been the most destructive force on the planet since the last asteroid, and maybe try to atone for our sins a bit by meditating on how we can move forward in a more balanced way – and then doing it. Take the action. Two days when we contemplate how every living thing is, if not a sibling, then surely a cousin. Two days when we contemplate what “alive” really means, how we’re all just colonies of other, smaller life forms, walking around in other, bigger colonies. Humbling much? You betcha! In exactly the right way!
Blessed and humbling Day of Equality to you, whichever hemisphere you’re in, and all your siblings and cousins, every one.