At precisely 09:01 Irish time this morning, the Spring Equinox arrived. The Earth’s axis tipped into perfect equipoise, and for a brief moment, light and darkness stood in delicate balance. I had set my alarm for 09:00, determined to mark the transition. The sun shone, the birds sang, and as I dug a furrow for potatoes, I turned my face towards the morning light. I let its warmth settle on my skin, feeling—rather than simply knowing—that the season had turned. Overcome by the quiet significance of it all, I gave thanks.
With each thrust of the spade, the soil split apart, damp and cool to the touch. Worms wriggled in the sudden light before burrowing back down, vanishing as quickly as they appeared. Small roots threaded through the earth, evidence of last season’s growth breaking down to feed what comes next. The soil was alive, shifting, working—always in motion, even when unseen.
In winter, this would have been a different experience. The soil would have been cold and unyielding, the worms deeper, the world asleep. Patrick Kavanagh understood this contrast well. His poem Advent does not celebrate the arrival of Christmas, as one might expect from the title, but instead mourns the loss of innocence—the way experience dulls the senses, how we cease to see the world as it truly is. He longs for a return to first encounters, for a way to cleanse the mind of its cynicism:
We have tested and tasted too much, lover—
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
Winter, for Kavanagh, is a kind of spiritual discipline—a time to pare things back, to learn to long for the ordinary once more. And yet, the arrival of spring answers that longing. Where Advent is an exercise in restraint, the equinox is a release. If winter was about waiting, spring is about waking.
Emily Dickinson, ever attuned to nature’s quiet revelations, wrote:
A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
That light—like the life in the soil—speaks to something larger than us, something eternal in its transience. Walt Whitman, with his exuberant embrace of the earth, urges us not to falter:
Be not discouraged—keep on—there are divine things well envelop’d, I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.
The Stoics, too, saw change as something not to be feared but accepted with grace. Marcus Aurelius, in Meditations, observed:
Observe how all things are continually being dissolved and re-formed. The universe is change; life is opinion.
And then there is Whitman again, in This Compost, where he marvels at the earth’s ability to absorb all that has passed and transform it into new life:
Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form’d part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies…
The equinox reminds us of this essential truth: balance is fleeting, change is inevitable, and yet, within the movement of time, there is beauty—something sacred in the mere fact of existence. As the days lengthen and the world wakes from its slumber, we might take Whitman’s advice—keep on—and trust, as Dickinson did, that spring’s peculiar light, though transient, will always return.
Consilium 