A Wizard's Meditation for Spring

A happy equinox and many blessings to you all

May you note today the equality of light and dark,
May you feel that balance for what it is: magnificent and momentary.
May you have the seeds you need to plant your year,
Failing that, may you find them in the days now to come.
May they be healthy seeds.
May they already contain the spark and essence of all life.
In the weeks to come, may they meet with friendly and fertile soil,
May they grow to spread that spark and essence outward
And eventually upward
And into the light.
May you tend your year’s crop with utmost care,
May the climate be in your favor,
May you grow what you intend and may your harvest be bountiful,
For another winter will still come.
For today, may you find joy in the sun and the grass-to-be.

Here in New England, everybody celebrates the spring. By the time March 20 rolls around every year, everyone but the most die-hard winter lovers and ski freaks is wicked done with it. All of it. You see it less in the morose, downcast facial expressions — which have become customary by this time, we’ve long since stopped noticing them — than in the contrast that’s obvious when the nice days finally come, when we can all tell that even if there’s one or two more storms, the spell is broken, the sentence is up. The bounce in everyone’s steps, the extra smiles, the sudden surge of energy and vitality, even lust. It hasn’t been nearly long enough for any of us to have replenished our natural vitamin D supplies, but it seems as though our bodies are able to anticipate its return and orient toward it as the plants turn toward the sun.

This is worth celebrating, and I hope we all have a chance today or at least this week to pause and celebrate the hell out of it. We need it, I would argue, just as we need food and air.

We need it especially now, because winter is hard and in New England it’s long, and because between New Years and Easter there’s usually precious little excuse for celebration. St. Patrick’s Day doesn’t count.

The fact is, even in this meaning-averse, celebration-allergic culture, we can’t help but mark all of the seasons. That’s true even when we claim we aren’t doing it. Easter (or, for some — sigh — St. Patrick’s Day) is our spring festival. In the US, the Fourth of July — roughly two weeks following the summer solstice — is the summer festival. We do tend to blow off the fall a little bit, although we certainly commemorate the late harvest festivals with our also-disguised late-October holidays. And then, of course, Christmas marks the coming of the winter season.

We do not do this simply because we are bored (although we might well be a lot more bored if we didn’t). We do it because, in truth, there is no separation between us and this planet we ride on and all the other things that ride along with us. We are, as much as anything else — as much as the trees and the dirt and the magma — Earth. If Earth, in its misshapen transit around our star, with our weird little cockeyed tilt thing we have going on, experiences these significant seasonal phases, and if we are the Earth, then we too, whether we like it or not, experience these significant seasonal phases, too. It’s a primal, existential thing welling forth from deep within. No matter how superior we see ourselves — and I am the guiltiest speciesist snob of them all — we do not simply watch these phenomena unfold before us but are ourselves part of them, right in the thick of it all.

Itis when we recognize this and adjust ourselves accordingly that we able to reach the heights of our power and our potential for peace, for flow with the Grand Order of it all. There are many metaphors one can choose to express this concept, but for me, having never been a farmer, hardly ever having set foot in a farm setting, and being totally ignorant of such matters, the one that comes most naturally to me is the agricultural one. I mean, all jokes aside, all farms aside, what we see with the turning of the seasons is the life growing slowly up from the earth before bursting FORTH in a certain holy fury, before bearing its fruit and finally going back to sleep, or dying, again. To go from these seemingly automatic processes to those similar processes engineered and manipulated by humans is hardly a leap.

So bear with me, the stupid non-farmer, and go with it for a minute: starting today, for the next three months, it’s planting season. Maybe you know this because you have a garden or cool plants or even your own real live crops, but I’m talking mostly about the seeds of life and of intention. What happens in our lives is not so different from what happens in the fields. The outcome of any given year is almost entirely the product of its beginning. What is harvested is determined, of course, by what is planted. And you can’t do all that much planting in summer, much less the fall. Now is the time. You’ve got several months. My advice is to get started immediately, but if you’re a procrastinator like me, that’s okay, too. We have until June.

The important thing is note that now is the time. What do you want out of this year for your life and the lives of those around you? What is required to get there? Answer that question and you’ve got your seeds. Put them in the ground. Get started. 2019 is upon us.

Happy Equinox. Happy Spring.