This Saturday is the Autumn Equinox in the northern hemisphere (and the Spring Equinox in the southern hemisphere).
The equinoxes are where the light and darkness of the Earth hangs in perfect balance - the days and the nights are the same length for a brief period, before we move towards the next solstice. From here on in, the days will begin to get shorter, and the nights longer, until we mark the shortest day on the Winter Solstice.
Right now, light and dark are in harmony.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for our relationship to the natural world.
Losing our balance
For our ancestors, the equinoxes and solstices were key events in the calendar, not only to be celebrated but to guide their way of living. They followed the cycles of the Earth and the rhythms of nature dictated their way of being. In our modern world, these seasonal shifts pass with little acknowledgement and make hardly any impact on our lives.
It’s dangerous to romanticise the “olden days”, as if they were a glorious past when all was well with the world. I don’t want to go back to eras of hard manual labour, rampant disease and child marriage. I’m very much in favour of healthcare, sanitation and voting rights. But whilst we have made positive progress in some areas, there’s no doubt that something has been lost along the way.
We’ve lost a sense that we are part of the natural world, that we’re connected to the planet that we live on. We’ve lost an understanding of how the rhythms of the Earth affect us, and how dependent we are on nature for our survival.
Maybe that’s why we no longer feel the need to take care of this planet.
In so many ways, the continued destruction of the only inhabitable planet in our solar system by beings that live on said planet seems utterly insane. We have been being warned about the dangers of climate change, and the ways in which our actions are accelerating the damage and bringing about our own doom, for years. Yet nothing has changed. Governments and corporations, by and large, acknowledge the problem, but decline to fix it because they prioritise short-term profits over the survival of their own species.
That’s ludicrous, isn’t it?!
Why aren’t we all screaming at them to do something? Why aren’t we all taking to the streets to demand change? Instead, we’re complaining that the people who do take to the streets are inconveniencing our commute. What’s wrong with us?
The only answer that makes sense to me is that we simply don’t recognise the natural world as our environment anymore. We’ve so separated ourselves from nature, building our concrete cages around ourselves, blinding ourselves to the light above us and tarmacking over the earth beneath us, that we have almost forgotten that it matters. For so long, we’ve told ourselves that humans sit at the top of the evolutionary tree, that our reason and logic is what makes us great and should be prioritised above our more “base”, “animal” instincts, that we’ve bought into our own hype.
Internal equilibrium
We haven’t only lost our sense of balance with nature. We’ve lost a sense of balance within ourselves.
I was deeply struck by this passage in Sharon Blackie’s book If Women Rose Rooted:
“The parallels are clear in our culture, which has for centuries suppressed those qualities (dreaming, creativity, openness, nurturing, community) which are perceived to be feminine. Much of the unique wisdom that women hold has been eradicated or driven underground, out of sight, away from the dangerous, damning eyes of men. It’s no accident that this systematic suppression of the feminine has been accompanied down the centuries not only by the devaluation of all that is wild and instinctual in our own natures, but by the purposeful destruction of natural ecosystems. We long ago turned our backs on the planet which gives us life.”
Sharon Blackie, If Women Rose Rooted
Blackie reflects on how, particularly in Celtic culture, women were historically seen as the guardians of the land and the authorities on the natural order. For Blackie, the devaluing of female power and feminine qualities is intimately linked with the devaluing and exploitation of nature.
I also think this extends beyond the binary perception of men and women, and includes how we perceive that balance of masculine and feminine qualities within each of us as individuals. Gender binaries are a purely societal construct - each of us is a mixture of masculine and feminine, and that mix varies at different times and in different contexts. Yet society has indoctrinated us with this concept that men must be masculine and women must be feminine, and that there is one right way to be each of those things. We’ve been taught that the feminine qualities in all of us are inferior, and the masculine qualities are to be revered. And because that same system has dictated that women must conform to supposedly feminine ways of being, women have the game rigged against us from the start. Men, meanwhile, have lost access to the feminine parts of their own nature.
This denying of our true selves, of these vital parts of ourselves, and the disruption of our own sense of balance, is having drastic consequences. Our physical and mental wellbeing is suffering, our communities are fracturing and our relationships with one another are straining. Yet we continue.
Creating harmony
As Blackie notes, creativity is one of those “feminine” qualities that we have devalued and suppressed, and it’s also a quality that links us closely with the creative powers of the natural world. Reclaiming our creative nature is a meaningful way to re-root ourselves in the earth, start to rediscover our own internal balance and find greater harmony with the natural world. It’s also a way for women, and other groups that have been marginalised and repressed, to rediscover their voices and reclaim a sense of power.
If you become a paid subscriber to I Am Happy, then you’ll receive monthly journals to identify natural events and shifts, and enable you to build a creative practice in alignment with the rhythms of nature.
And tomorrow, paid subscribers will get a special guide to Autumn Equinox rituals and creative prompts.
For all of us, the Autumn Equinox provides an opportunity to reflect on our sense of balance, with our environment and within ourselves.