Twenty-three and a half degrees: that’s the tilt of our planet as it makes its way around the sun and this tilt, this 23.5 degrees, is the key to our seasons and our constant shifting, each day a bit different from the one before and the one after. And come 8:05 PM Eastern Daylight Time this evening, summer officially gives way to autumn: it is the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, with the opposite being true in the Southern Hemisphere, for there, this is the moment that spring begins. Things will be more or less balanced for a short time, but as we continue past this day, from this point forward we here in the Northern Hemisphere will have more darkness each day than light, while folks in the Southern Hemisphere will have more light each day than darkness.
And so the sun about now is rising pretty much due east and setting pretty much due west. We are in a brief time of balance: directional (east/west) and also in amount of day and night: both are pretty much the same for a spell, no matter where we are on this great planet. It always seems to me, too, that this balance is worth emulating in our own lives and perhaps worth seeking at least twice each year as the two equinox periods come and go. Not an easy task, to be certain, but worth a shot, no?
It may be the first day of autumn by the almanac, but in traditional reckoning of time, the equinox is the midpoint of autumn, which began with the first of the harvest festivals, Lammas, at the start of August. Again, balance, as we find ourselves at the center of the season, half of it in the past, half of it yet to come, both sides of it on either side of where we stand now.
What we know for certain is that here in the Northern Hemisphere, the nights will soon grow longer than the days, and the air will get cooler. It is always most welcome to us here in Lake Worth. I was struck, though, the other day, reading an article in the New York Times by an author who saw things differently. Her perspective so vastly different from my own: how she was holding on to every last grasp of summer as tightly as she could for as long as she could. We’ve had quite enough of it here, thank you very much, but it’s all relative.
Image: “Celestial Sphere with Ecliptic,” a diagram showing the Celestial Sphere with ecliptic and equinoxes, by N Sanu, 2020. Courtesy Creative Commons.