Original post from March 20, 2021
Spring is at its sweet peak, no longer so cold, but the mornings are still refreshing, the ground is still wet, and everything is green. It’s not by chance that the major Jewish holidays are around the equinoxes, when we long to spend as much time outside as we can after the hard winter or summer. In the spring, life is at its peak, the birds call and fly from dawn to dusk, mating, building nests, feeding their young. This is the season of life. This year (it was 2021) we feel it more than ever, with everything finally opening after more than a year of lockdowns.
The term equinox conjures up a quiet balance between day and night, as if all is peaceful, but the reality is the opposite – the equinoxes are the periods of greatest movement, when the length of day and night change very quickly, a dynamic time of shifting winds. Every year life’s vigor is felt strongly in this season: body, soul, and spirit all respond to the great story of the wheel of the year. As an animist, this is natural and expected.
And I always have trouble with this season. To walk around the streets near my house and see the municipal workers (or the contractor workers that the municipality hires, I didn’t find out) laboring to mow the flowers on the sides of the roads that are so sweet and dear to me, the trees that have been “pruned” down to the stumps of their large branches, the borders of the fields that are reduced to nothing every year, all humble habitats that are disappearing, homes of other members in the family of life, and also precious beings in their own right.
Every such act also reminds me, loudly, that the culture I am a part of not only does not share my values, it is actively at war with them. Sometimes I think about how my Jewish ancestors felt when their synagogues were destroyed and their Torah scrolls burned – only that my houses of prayer and sacred texts are not just words or symbols, they are living beings in their own right. And they support our lives, regulating our weather, feeding us, providing us with clean air to breathe, offering us physical, mental, and spiritual healing.
It’s hard not to get disheartened when I walk around my home environment and the campus where I work. I write to remind myself and others who feel as I do, that as an animist, the answer lies in listening to the beings themselves. Go to a place and connect with plants who are in good condition. Don’t project, don’t assume, don’t explain. Listen. Notice how the green creatures behave and to hear what they have to say. The reason to go to plants who are doing well is less because of the plants themselves and more to avoid getting tangled in our own emotions. (Although one tree I know felt too busy healing after losing a third of its volume in a storm to want to chat.) They usually don’t take things nearly as hard as I do. They understand that we humans are very lost, and continue to give of themselves and their example with compassion and the desire to help heal.
In the meantime, we haven’t lost the seasons yet, the cycle of the year that gives life and dynamic stability continues to rotate, felt strongly in this season. Let us go out, invite them into us after a difficult year, celebrate them and thank them.
May you have a blessed equinox!