This weekend (20th March) marks the Spring Equinox it’s the point of perfect balance on the journey through the Wheel of the Year. Night and day are of equal length and in perfect equilibrium – dark and light, in balance. The year is now waxing and at this moment light defeats the dark. The natural world is coming alive, the Sun is gaining in strength and the days are becoming longer and warmer. Or as Ann Ridler writes in her poem called Spring Equinox:
“Now is the pause between asleep and awake….”
The past year has been somewhat different to what we’ve known before – a year dominated globally by the Covid19 pandemic, whilst in the background lurks perhaps an even larger threat to humanity a global crisis of climate change. It’s been a year of constantly shifting seasons – not just in terms of the weather but also in our moods; although sometimes the two have seemed linked. How much easier did it feel in the initial days of lockdown when the sunshine was out and we could spend our days sat in the garden or somewere else outside, so much more positive (despite the sadness and fear the surrounded us) then those latter days of winter restrictions, locked away in our homes railed against the darkness and cold of winter.
We’ve felt the harsh despair of a new virus with no known cure, threatening all our very lives – the loss of so many of our loved ones in nursing homes and beyond – the isolation and separatedness we’ve felt from each other as the need to stay safe kept us from physical contact on so many ocassions. But we also know joy and hope and inspiration; from the demonstrations of admiration for our Health and Care workers – the great many of inspirational stories of people being community and offering support to each other – right through to the great hopes set for the roll out of a vacination programme that will hopefully provide some kind of global solution to this pandemic. Despair and hope it seems have been both felt in almost equal degrees.
As we celebrate Spring Equinox this year it is perhaps worth giving thought to this time of balance in nature to try and make sense of a world that at times has felt completely out of balance. In the UK alongside Covid19 we’ve still not healed the very wide and open wounds caused during (and to an extent by) Brexit, wounds that have at times felt like they are opening even wider as we face the reality of so many peoples experience as highlighted by Black Lives Matter, and latterly by the reactions of many women to the murder of Sarah Everard and the response to their protests in its wake.
“No person, no place, and no thing …..” wrote Louise L Hay “….has any power over us, for we are the only thinkers in our mind. When we create peace and harmony and balance in our minds we will find it in our lives.”
At this time I’m reminded of the well know prayer of St Francis and the call that it makes to God that we should become the force and means of balance in the world at large:
“Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine [Creator],
Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved, as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
And it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.”
Amen.
pioneer thoughts 