Balancing act

I'm writing this ahead of time, just after the equinox: when day and night are roughly equal lengths. There was an instant of equality, but it hurtled past.

Today is going to be four minutes longer than yesterday, and by this time next week the daylight will have grown nearly another half hour. On the other hand, the day after the winter solstice was less than a minute longer, and even after a week it had still only grown three minutes.

We rock from day to night like a child on a swing. At the solstice we seem to hang suspended in a moment of weightless, timeless astonishment before gravity breaks in and rushes us back to, and then past, the ground.

Equinox isn't a peaceful balance between opposing forces: equinox isn't stillness. Equinox is speed. The energy gathered up in the long night propels us through equinox towards the longest day, where we will hang motionless again for a charmed instant. The solstices are our homes and we stop a moment to refresh our inner and outer worlds. Balanced at the extremes, we pause before changing direction.

The moment of equal night and day offers no such pause: the road is clear and we thunder by. Everything is pulling the same way. Equinox is no destination; it is a milestone. It says 'Take heart: we're on the homeward stretch'.