Mabon – Feminism and Religion

Small, perfect, magnificent! The creature lay in Mark’s hand, unmoving. Stunned or dead—we couldn’t tell. Some birds recover from impact with our sliding glass door and some do not. This was a hard hit—I could hear it from another room—and as I gazed at the beauty of this bird—a blue-winged warbler Mark said, I felt pretty sure the Goddess would call home it soon.

As I write this, fall equinox—Mabon to some of us—is two days away. Already here in Maine the days are noticeably shorter. The dark times are upon us now. Daylight will diminish minute by minute until winter solstice when the sun will grace us with nine whole hours of light before the Wheel of the Year turns and the days begin to lengthen, almost imperceptibly. The anniversary of my first husband’s death is a few days after equinox so this is always a hard time of year for me as I face into the darkness and the inevitably of death.

Glenys Despite the chocolate bunnies, eggs and toy chickens in the shops along with the coaxing to buy and celebrate Easter at this time in Australia, it is not Spring: Earth here does not seem to co-operate with the Consumer Faith, built as it is around the Northern Hemisphere and dominant Christian calendar. In the Southern Hemisphere it is Autumn, the dark part of the day is lengthening.

On March 20^th at 4:30 UT Earth will be perfectly poised in balance for a moment: it is a global moment of Equinox – one of the annual two. Humans have celebrated it for millennia, perhaps for many tens of thousands of years, in ways appropriate to various regions, in both the South and the North of the Planet. The light and dark parts of the day in the South and in the North of our planet, are of equal length at this time. In the Northern Hemisphere it is Spring, and Easter is commonly celebrated: with those of Earth-based tradition celebrating the moment and season of Equinox with the name of Eostar. Continue reading “It’s Autumn in the Southern Hemisphere – not Spring/Eostar by Glenys Livingstone”