[coordinates: at the low table with the new arrivals – one solid black baby kitten in my lap and his matching brother pawing to climb up and join the party]
For the last four days, I’ve been going outside at sunrise as the sky is reborn from black to blue. I sit facing the sun and make my morning song and prayers. I speak to my bones and remind them “spring is here.”
It’s been the most essential five minutes of my day.
Without these clues, we get stuck in a perpetual state no-time liminality. We are healthier when our bodies are located correctly in the somewhere and some-when.
Our ancestors all across the globe marked feasts at Equinox and Solstice so that the whole culture oriented to the year’s cycles.
My genetic heritage of Tuatha Dé Danann, the pre-Celtic inhabitants of what’s now called Ireland, went to great effort to create stone temples that precisely mark this date. These temples are older than Giza and still function perfectly as markers of the season’s change. How’s that for some precise technology?
We’ve lost most of the cues that locate us in time.
It’s not ideal for our bodies to not know what season it is. We no longer have full moon parties which locate us in the month. We no longer have the huge feasts that locate us in the season.
With supermarket food offering us all foods in all seasons, our bodies have one less signal of what time of year it is. We are designed to have cycles of feast and famine, not to have exactly the same basket of food in May as December.
Mexico grows quite a lot of the fruit and veg for the US. We eat more seasonally here. When mangos aren’t in season they aren’t in the store. Mexicans are used to paying about a dollar a pound for mangoes and have nearly zero interest in paying 5-10x more to import them from another hemisphere. Good! When mangoes return, we feast! We they aren’t, we feast on what is.
You can do the same by buying from farmer’s markets or getting a farm box delivered. Little changes really do help. Instead of eating strawberries twelve months a year brought to you by the Driscoll corporation in a plastic box, enjoy the gift of their sweetness only in June and July. You will feel them like the gift from god that they are when their taste arrives in its time – rare and special.
Equinox science is cool.
The Equinox can sound like a lot of babble talk to our obsessively “rational” minds, but in truth, a ton of cool things are happening that science has the tools to observe and describe.
For one, there are cracks in the magnetic field during equinoxes which allow in more of the solar wind, giving us more brilliant auroras. The solar wind changes from primarily hitting the south pole to the north pole. For these few special days, it hits both poles equally. Pretty cool, eh?
This year and the next two are predicted to see extra solar flare activity, so the effect magnetic fields have on life on Gaia is particularly much during this time. Some scientists say it could be the strongest we’ve seen since the 1700s. If you (like me!) ever wanted to do an aurora trip, get your tickets booked during this cycle. Who wants to go to Iceland or Sweden?!
Time slips by ever faster and can blur beyond recognition unless we intentionally create some waypoints that locate us in the correct some-when. Until we modern beings reinstate some full moon and seasonal festivities, we need extra help resetting our circadian rhythms so we can align to better health.
Get outside for sunrise these next few days if you can. It’s a simple thing that you won’t fully understand the power of unless you do it. Your body will thank you.
Spring greetings from Oaxaca,
Cris and Team Dragon
P.S. Does that trip for Fall Equinox to see the aurora want to be more than just a tourist experience but instead a transformative (possibly kinky) journey of a lifetime with a high priestess at your side? We will add some entheogens to the experience to fully blow your mind…
You know where to find me. All replies to this email go straight to my inbox.
Received this morning from my client who’s on vacay from his job in the London theater: “Cris, just wanted to say thanks again for last night. You’re the real deal, you know what I mean?”
P.P.S. Here’s a poem by David Whyte about the Tuatha Dé Danann who were said to have "turned sideways into the light" and disappeared rather than go to war when the conquering Celts came to their shores.
Tobar Phadraig
Turn sideways into the light as they say
the old ones did and disappear
into the originality of it all.
Be impatient with easy explanations
and teach that part of the mind
that wants to know everything
not to begin questions it cannot answer.
Walk the green road above the bay
and the low glinting fields
toward the evening sun, let that Atlantic
gleam be ahead of you and the gray light
of the bay below you, until you catch,
down on your left, the break in the wall,
for just above in the shadows
you’ll find it hidden, a curved arm
of rock holding the water close to the mountain,
a just-lit surface smoothing a scattering of coins,
and in the niche above, notes to the dead
and supplications for those who still live.
But for now, you are alone with the transfiguration
and ask no healing for your own
but look down as if looking through time,
as if through a rent veil from the other
side of the question you’ve refused to ask.
And you remember now, that clear stream
of generosity from which you drank,
how as a child your arms could rise and your palms
turn out to take the blessing of the world.