equinox

 Look up and find the north star and know where you are. Watch the moon rise or set and know when you cannot see it, still it is there, a silent companion, unjudging, always present. When the sun rises and you face its rays you are literally reoriented. Understandable, then, that people always have drawn upon the changes and constancies in the skies for a sense of where and who they are. More involved is the understanding behind equinox. Every year predictably feature writers remind us that the days grow shorter as nights grow longer, and vice versa. They tell us that traditional feast days of many cultures coincide with the changes of the seasons, and with the long and short of days and nights. In between the longest and shortest are the equinoxes, the times when day and night are roughly equal, equidistant between the polar opposites of midwinter night and midsummer day. These are also occasions for observance of the heavens’ changes, and of our own. We see around us the seasons progress (or it seems, recede) around the solar revolution of the planet. We see the changes in plant and animal, weather and cloud. And we see in ourselves our reactions, some subtle, some not. “Are you ready for some football?” is not the least profound of our responses to changes in the year. Shopping for clothes and shoes, a box of pencils or an eraser or a backpack, or at last a new tablet, mark the beginning of a new school year. We find new paths to old places as rains carve new channels in the washes, and enjoy old paths that take us someplace new as seasons run. It all seems very benign, innocuous, … unless the day comes when a storm or sunstroke overwhelms us. Our desert is not benign, it is neutral. It is indifferent. What we do in it, for ourselves or others, is up to us. It will be hot or cold, brutally severe or calmingly luxurious, depending on our situation. If we find again that people are in need or want or distress because of the extremities of our weather, the fault, dear friends, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.