3/20/22
This morning at 11:33 am EDT Spring arrives at Merry Mount. Hooray!
At the Spring equinox the sun rises exactly in the east, travels through the sky for 12 hours and then sets exactly in the west. So all over the Earth, at this special moment, day and night are of equal length hence the word equinox which means ‘equal night’. For those of us here in the northern hemisphere, it is this equinox that brings us out of our winter. For Mother Nature it is a time of renewal, of rebirth. It is a time to shed negative energies accumulated over the dark, heavy winter months preparing the way for the positive growing energy of spring and summer.
As with all the other key festivals of the year, there are both Pagan and Christian associations with the Spring equinox. To Pagans, this is the time of the ancient Saxon goddess, Eostre, (Easter) who stands for new beginnings and fertility. For Christians it is a time to celebrate Easter, a time of resurrection. Thus Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon occurring on or after the Spring equinox. If the full moon falls on Sunday, Easter gets pushed back a week so that it doesn’t coincide with Passover.
It’s a magical time, and both the body and spirit rejoice with the increase in sunlight and a wakening world. We will stay alert at Merry Mount expecting fairies frolicking under the willow tree.
In the classic world, the chief of the equinoctial festivals was the rite of Dionysus, which is closely connected to the origin of drama. In prehistoric Greece, priests went with their followers to the fields at the time of the vernal equinox, to offer wine, milk and oil to the land and to chant songs -the odes. In time this rite was transferred to the city and theaters built around it. In the theater at Epidaurus, and the Theater of Dionysus, below the Acropolis in Athens, you can still go today and verify that the ritual altar is at the center of the orchestra, and the stage beyond it seems almost an afterthought. The word tragedy is simply tragos -goat - plus ode, a goat-song. And what do goats have to do with it? Simply that Dionysus was the god of wine and sexual passion, that the goat is a famously amorous animal, and that the followers of Dionysus, the satyrs, were depicted with goat feet and horns. As long as they kept performing tragedies in Greece, the crops came up every spring, just as the priests had promised.
-NYT 3/15/87 & 3/19/22
Watson (ButtHead) welcoming Spring
Ode to Spring
How wondrous thy music
This morning, now Spring.
Your Sun is well balanced
Your birds, how they sing!
CPW
Spring
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. – Have, get, before it cloy,
Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
Most, O maid’s child, thy choice and worthy the winning.
-Gerard Manley Hopkins
Listen to this excerpt from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring
CPW
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