ANYWAY. I'm here to talk about tomorrow's big event. You know, Alban Elfed, Cornucopia, the Feast of Avilon, the Festival of Dionysus, the Harvest Tide, Mabon, Night of the Hunter, the Second Harvest Festival, the Wine Harvest, otherwise known as the Witch's Thanksgiving. What? You still don't know what I'm talking about? It's the Autumnal Equinox, silly.
To be more specific, the Autumnal Equinox hits Oregon on September 22, 2009 at precisely 2:18pm PST. Were YOU aware it was happening, right under your nose even? More importantly, do you even care? For most of us this is simply a curiosity, unless of course you leave at higher latitudes and in a rainy state. (Can you tell I'm starting to miss the sun?)
Historically, such solar events have gone unnoticed in my mind, or noticed only after the event has long since passed. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if I was the only one at my office who noticed tomorrow's event, largely because we don't have to in our modern age. Yet there was a time when one's livelihood, nay one's soul revolved around these changes in the sun. Ancient monuments like Stonehenge, Newgrange, the Loughcrew Cairn, and the Chaco Sun Dagger continue to mark these transitions in both time and space. I've visited each of these and many more that possess a power to connect me in a very visceral way to the spiritual and scientific experiences of my distant ancestors.
Thankfully my perspective is changing due to a quirk of architecture that prompts me to remember my woad covered forefathers at the cusp of fall and the arrival of summer. For 250 days a year our bedroom can only receive indirect light, and serves as the perfect den for this hibernating bear. Yet on the days surrounding the equinoxes a beam of light is cast directly through the kitchen window, down the hall, and onto my side of the bed where it bathes me in a bright morning light for which there is no description. I'm not just waking but feel reborn! Or just blinded if my sleep quotient is low. I'd like to think that this was an intentional design decision, like the barrow tombs of Ireland or the window placement in the Spanish missions of old California and New Mexico, but that would be romanticizing the builder more than he deserves.
I wonder how this world would look if our modern religions were focused less on an abstract god that everyone fights over, and more on the regular cycles of nature and the planets. A calendar that the spiritual and the atheists could agree on, could engineer into our personal and public architecture, and find common ground on. A world where we argue about how best to celebrate these transitions, instead of asinine textual preferences and the appropriate level of bigotry and oppression to be directed at non-conforming groups or the female gender. Ah well, I can't changer the world, but I can welcome that beam of light.
