The Spring Equinox, also known as the Vernal Equinox, is a significant astronomical event that occurs twice a year - once in March and once in September. It is when the tilt of the Earth's axis is inclined neither away from nor towards the Sun, resulting in equal daylight and nighttime hours. During the Spring Equinox, the Sun is directly above the Earth's equator, causing the length of day and night to be almost equal all around the world. This phenomenon marks the transition from winter to spring in the Northern Hemisphere, while in the Southern Hemisphere, it signals the onset of autumn. In many cultures and religions, the Spring Equinox holds great symbolism. It is seen as a time of balance and renewal, representing the triumph of light over darkness.
The whole series of events is dedicated to Mary Hoogeveen, who died on March 14 and was a major supporter of Starhawk’s projects, including a motion picture adaptation of her book “The Fifth Sacred Thing.”
Like many others from across the spectrum of religious, spiritual and scientific communities, Starhawk said she perceives this to be a time of impending crisis for the Earth and all its inhabitants. As the dark and cold winter months give way to the bright and warm spring season, the natural world awakens from its slumber, and a new life begins to emerge.
It is seen as a time of balance and renewal, representing the triumph of light over darkness. Various ancient civilizations, such as the Mayans and Egyptians, constructed monuments and temples aligned with the position of the rising Sun during the equinoxes. The Spring Equinox is also associated with various cultural celebrations and traditions.
Starhawk to celebrate equinox in Humboldt
On Sunday, internationally known activist and writer Starhawk will visit Humboldt County to lead a Spring Equinox Ritual and Spiral Dance at the Humboldt Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, 24 Fellowship Way in Bayside.
”The purpose of the ritual is to honor the coming of spring and the turning of the seasons,” she said in a recent phone interview. “It’s a movement from winter to the warmer time of year, and that’s also kind of a movement that happens in ourselves. The ritual allows us to encounter parts of ourselves that maybe are about to open up and blossom — to plant the seeds of things in our own lives that we’d like to grow and flower, and to share that experience with other people and get support and encouragement. I think it’s similar in many ways to the Jewish Passover or the Christian Easter. Both have elements in them of celebrating the renewal of life.”
Starhawk is a prominent figure in the pagan community who is best known for her 1979 book “The Spiral Dance,” which introduced many people to Wicca, modern witchcraft, ecofeminism and the Goddess movement. She is one of the founders of the Reclaiming movement — spiritual groups dedicated to social change.
”I call myself a pagan, and we call our tradition Earth-based spirituality, Goddess spirituality or witchcraft. But sometimes people misunderstand the term ‘witchcraft.’ It’s really the survival of pre-Christian shamanic traditions and healing traditions from Europe and the Middle East,” she said.
Though she was raised Jewish, Starhawk was drawn to paganism while studying anthropology at UCLA.
”I was doing a project for a class and I met some people who were practicing what they talked about as the ‘Old Religion.’ They started talking about a religion that said nature is sacred; in which women were highly respected and there were no barriers to women’s leadership; and they worshipped the sacred in the form of the Goddess,” she said.
”For me, that was a real revelation. … Growing up Jewish, everyone said God has no form, but every time they talked about God it was always ‘he.’ All the leadership and all the rabbis at that time were all men. Now that’s changed in Judaism, but at that time it was very, very restrictive. I felt like this was something that kind of put words on the real experience I had had. My own sense of deepest connection always came when I was in contact with nature, not so much sitting in a synagogue or church. So I began studying and learning, and then eventually teaching and writing about it.”
Susan McGee, one of the local organizers of the Equinox event, said she first encountered Starhawk’s work in 1985, and that she was “fascinated” by the ideas. “I would call myself a witch and a pagan,” McGee said.
”A witch is someone who practices magic based on, in my case, Western European traditions. It involves a tremendous reverence for the Earth and for all living beings. We believe, and I believe, that the Goddess is immanent in every human being; that every human being is valuable; and that we have to take the consequences for our actions and take responsibility for what we do. It’s an ecstatic spirituality. It involves dance and song and drumming and chanting in order to raise energy to change things — change yourself, change the world,” she said.
While American culture has gradually become more accepting of paganism over the past 50 years, many misconceptions and misunderstandings remain.
”The major misconception is that we’re working evil and that we worship Satan. We don’t even believe in Satan. Satan is not in our pantheon. Anyone who tries to work ‘evil’ through witchcraft would end up having it bounce back on them three times, which is a real inhibitor. When you go into a sacred circle, you go in with an attitude of perfect love and perfect trust to make magic and do the right thing,” McGee said.
”I think that there is a difference between witchcraft and Christianity, Judaism and Islam, in that we don’t see deity as transcendent, meaning outside ourselves. We see deity as immanent — inside ourselves and in the natural world. People sometimes ask ‘Is there one Goddess or many?’ and we say ‘Yes.’ I believe there’s a unifying force. … When I talk to my friends who are truly spiritual, whether they’re Christians, Jews, Islamic or Buddhist, we have a tremendous amount in common.”
McGee also emphasized that pagans are not ignorant of science or deluded by a belief in “magic.” Rather, the difference is largely about terminology.
”We were just doing a healing ritual, and you can either think of it as ‘doing magic’ to help somebody heal, or you can think about it as helping a person tap into their unconscious mind to heal their own body. I believe in science. I believe in empirical fact. I’m very interested in research about what works and what doesn’t work in medicine and social work and domestic violence prevention. But I also believe that our brains and hearts and souls are extraordinary,” said McGee.
”When you get into your deep self … you tap parts of yourself that you’re not always conscious of in the daily humdrum … you tap into what truly makes us human, which is our ability to connect, our ability to make music, our ability to love each other and all those things that are beyond the mundane. So, when we are in a circle and we say ‘This is a time that is not a time and a place that is not a place, between worlds and beyond,’ we’re in a space where magic can happen.”
Kim Arnold, another organizer of the event, said, “I think my biggest resonation (with paganism) is that everything is cyclic — that we’re all connected — that we’re one with the Earth and we’re directly related to the planet and the planet to us. I just think of the interconnectedness of life, which is probably the biggest thing.
”I think a really large misconception when you start to talk about magic and witches … has always been (that a witch is) someone who will cast a bad spell over somebody or be vengeful in that way, and that’s absolutely not the case,” Arnold said. “We subscribe to what’s called the ‘Law of Three.’ The Law of Three is that whatever you put out there — whether it’s negativity or hate or something better — will come back to you times three. So really it’s very different from the societal concept of witches and magic. We don’t cast spells on people for vengeful reasons or that sort of thing. It’s more of a nature-based religion. It’s more about nature and the Earth and how we are all connected in it. … I think that (participants in Sunday’s ritual) will realize their interconnectedness to the Earth. I think that’s definitely going to be one of the main focuses.”
Starhawk also emphasized the commonality of different spiritual systems.
”I think a lot of people intuitively feel a deep connection to nature, whatever religion they might identify with,” she said. “And I think every religion, if you search within it, has some strand of it that says ‘Yes, nature IS sacred. The things that sustain our lives are important,’ whether you see that as the creation of a goddess or a god.”
Out of this deep reverence and love for nature, many pagans have been inspired to pursue paths of ecological and social healing, seeking ways to mend the wounds caused by centuries of exploitation and violence. One of the most popular and prominent of these methods is permaculture, a system of ecological design that emphasizes working with nature to create human habitats that are more efficient and sustainable than mainstream communities.
”If you believe the Earth is sacred, then it makes sense that you want to do something about it,” said Starhawk. “Permaculture, which is a system of ecological design, is a practical application of the idea that the Earth is sacred — the ‘how-to’ part. For me, it’s a wonderful balance between writing and teaching — which are very in-the-head, at-the-computer occupations — to then go out and plant something or dig in the ground or walk the sheep or work in a community garden with at-risk kids and get some dirt under your fingernails.
”For me, my daily practice is to spend some time in nature watching, listening, meditating — just kind of hearing what the land and the Earth want to say to me. It’s also part of how I live my life, you know, the choices that I make. If I’m planting something, if I’m growing some of my own food, if I’m making compost, if I’m recycling a piece of garbage instead of throwing it away, to me those are all acts of sacred practice. They’re part of how I try to act consistently with what I believe.”
Like many others from across the spectrum of religious, spiritual and scientific communities, Starhawk said she perceives this to be a time of impending crisis for the Earth and all its inhabitants.
”We are facing a time of immense challenges right now because of climate change, which is really just a symptom of our culture and technology and way of life being inherently unsustainable. Our economy is crashing, our institutions up and down the board are collapsing around us. We’re really challenged now to figure out a different way to live and behave,” she said.
”The good thing is that the things we actually need to do to deal with climate change are actually the same things we need to do if we want to create a world that’s more fair and more just and that works for everybody. Things like relocalizing our enterprises and our food production; shifting from destructive technologies like oil and gas to alternatives and renewables; restructuring our economy so that there are other values we take into consideration, not just profits for big corporations. …
”So the question is: Are we actually going to do it? There’s no technological reason why we can’t. We can not only shift from continuing to put carbon into the atmosphere, but there are actually very holistic, natural, safe and beneficial ways that we can take carbon out of the atmosphere — basically through building soil. And that’s one of the things that permaculture is teaching people right now. But whether we’re gonna do it fast enough or not …
”I think it’s like being in a movie where the heroine is tied to the railroad tracks and the train is running down and you don’t know if we’re gonna get there in time enough to save the day or not. It makes it an exciting time to be alive, but I think it’s a time that really calls all of us to step up and figure out what we can do, and to do it in the most effective and biggest way possible,” she said.
To individuals who want to make a positive difference in the world, Starhawk said, “Think about the issues that most concern you right now. What do you most care about? What’s most sacred to you? Not in the sense that you put it on a pedestal, but in the sense that it’s really, really important and you don’t want to see it harmed or compromised.
”And then figure out who’s doing something about it. Is there an organization you can join or a campaign to get involved with? Are there ways to change things in your own life to make it more congruent with the vision you have of how the world should be? When you do that, I think you’ll find there are enormous resources all around us and enormous allies.
”Whatever things you might forego, I think you receive back so much more because there’s no better sense than the sense of ‘I’m putting my energies toward the changes in the world that I want to see, and I’m putting my energies in the service of the things I most deeply care about.’”
The equinox ritual on Sunday starts at 5:30 p.m. (doors open at 4:30 p.m.), and tickets will be sold at the door on a sliding scale from $10 to $50, depending on what people can afford. Parking is limited, so attendees are asked to carpool, bike, or park and walk. Bring a battery-powered flashlight or lantern and dress for the weather. The event will take place rain or shine, and it will be interpreted in American Sign Language. Wheelchair seating will be available, and the site is accessible to those with disabilities.
”We’ll make accommodations for anybody who needs help,” said McGee. “It’s a key part of doing this work — making sure we’re accessible not just to people with disabilities, but to everyone, and to make sure that our events are welcoming to the entire community.”
On Monday, Starhawk will be at Moonrise Herbs, 826 G St. in Arcata, for a book signing at noon, and at Humboldt State University’s Kate Buchanan Room that evening at 5:30 p.m. giving a talk titled, “Magic, Activism and Changing the World.” Both events are free and open to the public.
The whole series of events is dedicated to Mary Hoogeveen, who died on March 14 and was a major supporter of Starhawk’s projects, including a motion picture adaptation of her book “The Fifth Sacred Thing.”
”I think a lot of people intuitively feel a deep connection to nature, whatever religion they might identify with,” she said. “And I think every religion, if you search within it, has some strand of it that says ‘Yes, nature IS sacred. The things that sustain our lives are important,’ whether you see that as the creation of a goddess or a god.”
For example, in ancient Rome, the equinox was celebrated with the festival of Hilaria, which included games and processions honoring the goddess Cybele. In modern times, many people celebrate the arrival of spring by participating in activities such as egg hunts, planting gardens, and enjoying outdoor gatherings. From a scientific standpoint, the Spring Equinox is a remarkable event that highlights the intricate relationship between the Earth and the Sun. It illustrates the cyclical nature of our planet's journey around the Sun and reminds us of the changing seasons and the beauty of nature. Overall, the Spring Equinox is a significant event that is celebrated and recognized in various ways across different cultures and societies. It marks the transition from winter to spring, symbolizes balance and renewal, and reminds us of the immense power and beauty of our planet and the natural world..
Reviews for "Finding Balance and Harmony on the Spring Equinox"
1. John - 2 stars - I really wanted to like "Sring equuno pagab" but I found it incredibly confusing and hard to follow. The plot was convoluted and the characters were poorly developed. The dialogue felt forced and unnatural, making it even more difficult to engage with the story. Overall, I was left feeling frustrated and disappointed by this book.
2. Sarah - 1 star - "Sring equuno pagab" was one of the most boring books I've ever read. The pacing was incredibly slow and nothing seemed to happen for long stretches of time. The writing style was monotonous and lacked any excitement or emotion. I struggled to finish this book and had zero connection to any of the characters. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone looking for a captivating read.
3. Emily - 2 stars - I had high expectations for "Sring equuno pagab" based on the positive reviews, but unfortunately, it fell flat for me. The story lacked depth and the world-building was weak. I found it hard to fully immerse myself in the narrative as I couldn't connect with the main characters. The pacing was also inconsistent, with some parts dragging on while others felt rushed. Overall, I was left feeling underwhelmed and unfulfilled by this book.
4. Michael - 1 star - I can't believe I wasted my time on "Sring equuno pagab". The writing was pretentious and overly complicated, making it a chore to read. The plot was convoluted and lacked coherence, causing me to lose interest early on. The characters were unlikeable and their actions didn't make sense. I struggled to find any redeeming qualities in this book and would not recommend it to anyone.