By Terri Mackenzie SHCJ

(Read her blog post on the Spring Equinox in full.)

You have surely noticed that daylight is increasing in the Northern Hemisphere (or that it is lessening in the Southern). No doubt our ancestors — dating back aeons — noticed this, too.

By all means participate this spring in whatever celebrations are held by the religion of your choice to honor specific events in its salvation history. This is sacred time, deserving our deep prayerful participation. But also remember why the celebrations take place at this time of year.

You might also wish to honor the equinox on March 20th with this brief memorial, perhaps with new insights into your religious traditions:

1. Begin by being very conscious that you are held by gravity whether you are sitting, standing, or lying down. Imagine your place in your bioregion and its size. Continue extending awareness of your “place” until you feel embedded in your hemisphere and this entire planet. Our spherical home is relentlessly rotating East. Try to sense that movement. If you can see the sun, remember that it is not moving; you, on Earth, are traveling. Integrate your special religious remembrances into this history.

2. Keeping in mind Earth’s rotation, check this image. It shows Earth size relative to our sun. We know we travel completely around the sun each year. Far from being close, Sun is about 90 million miles away, and its light takes eight minutes to reach us. Once each year, when our double trajectory is just right, we experience the spring (or autumn in the Southern Hemisphere) equinox. Recall that our sun is a star.

3. Ponder Walt Whitman’s poem, “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”

When I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

No matter what time of day it is, stars are around us. Enter into the feeling of this poem. Look out (not necessarily up!) to wonder, to marvel, to be aware of the equinox mystery and our place in the cosmos.

4. End this memorial any way you wish.