Fall Equinox

I wrote in an earlier post (July 31) about the four Celtic cross-quarter days of the year, and how they can hold more meaning than the solstices and equinoxes for folks who live close to the land. Well, I’ll retract that sentiment a little bit, after experiencing another fall equinox. I still contend that the solstices creep by so excruciatingly slowly that one gets precious little sense of anything happening then—other than the intellectual knowledge that the sun has reached its extreme northerly or southerly point in the sky.

In contrast, the equinoxes speed by so quickly that it’s hard to keep up with the changes. The day’s length shortens nearly three minutes every day. Most of that is caused by a sun that sinks about two minutes sooner every night. That’s too fast a transformation to keep pace with!

That rapid change sort of slaps me upside the face, shouting to me that a new season is upon us. It jerks me out of those boring, interminable dog days of summer. Cool weather is upon us. Look out! Fall is here; winter’s near.

The rapid decreasing of day length triggers all sorts of commensurate changes in nature—the most spectacularly visible one being the loss of the photosynthetic capability of tree leaves, as they release their green and display those vivid fall colors. Garden plants have already been noticing the shorter days, as they yield their last fruits and prepare to die. A month earlier we could barely keep up with the vegetable harvest—chucking things into the freezer and frantically canning. Now we savor the taste of every bit of the fresh produce, as it slowly peters out.

Insects also get ready for the coming season. For most of them, their final days are here. Profuse mating, procreation, and dying are occurring. In fact, the letting go of life is everywhere. Plants seed and then die. Bugs lay eggs and then die. When I sit on decaying leaves for a few minutes in the woods, I become aware of dead things all around me.

While we humans fear death and attempt to distance ourselves from it, nature’s creatures seem to go willingly into that dark night. Certainly they have little ability to complain about it, as we do. When I become absorbed in nature, however, fall’s death and dying are really a reminder of the amazing cycle of life—rather than a gloomy reminder of my mortality.

The price of evolution, the cost of being part of the beautiful variety, development, and robustness of life on this planet, is death. It’s an exquisite balance. None can live but that others die. We all—insect, plant, human—have but the most brief but marvelous moment to experience our taste of that life. May we make the most of it, while we’ve got it. I think I’ll go for a walk in the equinox forest.