Day and night, day and night, dayandnight, day'n'ight . . . As earth pirouetted into her equinoctial position on the 22nd of September, we were spinning through 12,500 miles of daylight following an equally long swing through starlight. The alternation of light and dark in our lives is so deeply connected to our sense of sequential time, it's easy to forget that these rhythms arise out of our spiraling, spinning, and speeding through space. Midway through our annual sun dance, earth's equinox is a balance-point, a breathing time, a time of equality between day and night.
Parented by our earth, moon, and sun, we are "offspring of the stars," and it may be more than just poetic fancy to imagine the relationship to our inner Divinity as similar to that of earth toward her sun. Why, then, is our own equilibrium so illusive?
Have we forgotten that harmony is dynamic, not static? The whole solar system is jitterbugging at 125 miles per second, circling around its galactic center while our hearts beat time. Wobbly earth, and you, and I are scurrying round the sun, careening and cycling through more that 580 million miles of uncharted space each year. And all this while being carried within our Milky-Way-Galaxy-Space-Craft shooting along at 200 miles per second — our reflections happening on the fly. No time outs, no standing still, no paralysis . . . nothing stuck for even a second, no resting as we like to imagine it.
Each breath offers us a miniature replay of this vigorously graceful dance. Dawns and twilights, solstices and equinoxes, remind us that no matter how far we may swing out, we must eventually swing back; the tides turn, what rises falls, and as we consciously enact in the small the truths of the large, we strengthen our awareness of the One and only dance there is.
I trust that even if we seem to be oblivious, a higher aspect of ourselves commemorates the special turning points each year; resetting internal clocks, synchronizing sacred ways. This autumn, if we can't actually hold hands, let us hold each other in our hearts, and celebrate a kind of inner equinox of the soul.
(From Sunrise magazine, October/November 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Theosophical University Press)