photo by Kate Ter Haar
Spring
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Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
Junk Road, (named after our dear neighbors whose
ancestors settled here) runs for four miles directly east/west. At the Spring (vernal) equinox, I notice with
glee that the setting sun on the horizon is dropping directly into the west end
of Junk Road. I do not need to travel to
Stonehenge to visually recognize that Spring has officially arrived.
At the Spring equinox the sun
rises exactly in the east, travels through the sky for 12 hours and then sets
exactly in the west. So all over the Earth, at this special moment, day and
night are of equal length hence the word equinox which means ‘equal night’. For those of us here in the northern
hemisphere, it is this equinox that brings us out of our winter. Hooray!
For Mother Nature it is a time of renewal, of rebirth. It is a time to shed negative energies
accumulated over the dark, heavy winter months preparing the way for the
positive growing energy of spring and summer.
Gerard Manley Hopkins writes, “What
is all this juice and all this joy?”
Just ask Walt, our buck.
As with all the other key festivals of the year,
there are both Pagan and Christian associations with the Spring equinox. To Pagans, this is the time of the ancient
Saxon goddess, Eostre, (Easter) who stands for new beginnings and fertility. For Christians it is a time to celebrate
Easter, a time of resurrection. Thus Easter falls on the first
Sunday after the first full moon occurring on or after the Spring equinox. If
the full moon falls on Sunday, Easter gets pushed back a week so that it
doesn’t coincide with Passover.
It’s a magical time, and both the body and
spirit rejoice with the increase in sunlight and a wakening world. So like Vivi, we will stay alert at Merry Mount expecting fairies frolicking under the willow tree,
and while we will keep our eyes open for the Easter bunny,
we will continue to feed our chickens so that they will provide us with "golden" eggs.
Happy Spring!
CPW
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