The Equinox
Light spreads into darkness, not the other way around
The feathered snake god slides down an ancient stone temple. Like all of the best gods, Kukulkan is not visible most of the time. His head, a gaping maw of serpent badassery, is fixed in place at the base of his temple in southern Mexico. But most days, his body is absent. Twice a year, a one-two punch of astronomical reality and Mayan insight come together, creating the massive, undulating body of a serpent out of shadow and stone.
At the solstices, we are at astronomical extremes, the position of the Earth such that half of the planet is tilted most directly towards the sun, the other half away. On the northern summer solstice, we Americans enjoy a day with an abundance of sunlight; six months later, halfway around our orbit and tilted the opposite direction from the sun, we have our darkest day. Following that darkest day, it gets colder and colder, even as the days inch longer nearly imperceptibly for a good long time. When I lived in Michigan in my 20s, and decamped to Madagascar over several Winters to study the sex lives of poison frogs, I was asked once by a Malagasy man if I was there to make money. He just wasn’t buying the whole “scientific research for the sake of human knowledge” thing. “No,” I told him, “I’m chasing the light.”
The farther from the equator you are, the more extreme are your solstices. If you are in Anchorage in December, it can be difficult to relate to someone in the Everglades. At the solstices, we have the least in common with one another, astronomically speaking.
On the equinox, though, just for a moment, things even out, and the snake god shows himself.
Equinoxes are the great astronomical equalizers. Halfway between the solstices, the Earth’s tilt is neither towards nor away from the Sun. All of us, regardless of where we are on our shared planet, experience similar lengths of day and night. It is not quite true to say that day and night are equal on the equinox, however, for reasons both trivial and profound. With the help of an atmosphere, you see, light spreads into darkness, but darkness does not spread into light.
Stand outside at dusk. Keep your eyes wide open as they adjust to the failing light, and stay clear of electric light. The crisp edges of trees, people, the horizon—they all begin to soften, before disappearing entirely. Movements at the edges of your visual field feel more ominous. And at some point you lose color, the world sliding into grayscale, but can you mark that moment as it happens? I cannot.
Close your eyes and listen. This transition, this crepuscular time between day and night, is an opportunity for creatures who specialize on neither extreme. Their calls may hang in the cooling air. If you open your eyes, you may find that someone is very near you, someone who walks with such care that he is soundless. A fox, perhaps. Someone who was always very much aware of you, even while you were unaware of him.
Inhale deeply. Smell the landscape if you can, take in smells that change not just with the seasons, but with the time of day. Night-blooming flowers are a sensual pleasure, providing a surprise richness in the air when there is nothing left to see. The earth, too, smells different as it cools, and the air stills. Even your ability to smell has its own rhythm, its own circadian capacity that ebbs and flows.
Be barefoot on the Earth. Some will invoke gods or other mysteries to explain the virtues of grounding. I prefer the language of electromagnetic fields and our evolutionary history inextricably tied to this, our one and only planet, to understand why being in literal touch with the ground is good for you. Either way, the conclusion is the same. Be barefoot on the Earth, and remind yourself that you are home.
Be you in Anchorage or the Everglades, the equinox is now upon us, and we all have the same amount of daylight in which to get on with our lives. It’s been one hell of a Summer, and now perhaps things can calm down a bit. We can find our equanimity again.
Nikki McClure lives on the southern edge of the Salish Sea, and when she is not making art, she picks berries, watches birds, and sails. She is an exquisite artist, as well as my friend, and her medium is paper, from which she cuts intricate images from single sheets with an x-acto knife. For many years, one of her creations has been wall calendars, each month with one image, and one word. This month, September’s word is manifest. Consider the last ten years of her Septembers, marking the autumnal equinoxes of a prior decade: school, liberate, and try. Test and defend. Linger, need, subvert, chance. Barter and foster.
The equinox is an astronomical reality, but our months are not. If aliens were to actually land here, they would already know the length of our day, and our year. Or, at the very least, they would know how to calculate those without difficulty. A week, though, is a total human construct. Months come closer to describing something outside of us—they are not that far off from the moon’s cycle, while definitely not being the same. Said aliens would understand the desire for a unit of time between a day and a year, but they could not begin to guess the particulars from our astronomical position in the universe. They would have no way of knowing.
Similarly, the other organisms with which we share our planet have circadian rhythms, and annual ones, but they do not experience weeks.
Hummingbirds do not have Mondays. Gorillas have no weekends. But days, without distinction from one another, are a terrestrial universal. As are years.
All human cultures have understood days, too. They are easily measured. All human cultures have no doubt recognized years as well, as Summer always gives way to Autumn, before Winter, Spring, and Summer again, on endless repeat. But years are far more difficult than days to calculate with precision. The Maya had a calendar that came very close, in which units of time included days, of course, but also 20-day units—the winal—and in turn, 18 winals—the tun. The tun is thus 360 days long, very close to the length of an actual year. And the Maya played out the math further yet: 20 tuns is a katun, and 20 katuns is a baktun. A baktun is 144,000 days long—almost four hundred years.
Any people who measure such grand lengths of time must be forward thinking themselves. Indeed, the Maya were one of the world’s great civilizations, with an Enlightenment of their own long before the one in Europe. They had writing and roads, art and architecture, governance and gods. Some of them farmed, while others designed reservoirs to mitigate against drought. They had the concept of zero. And they had astronomy.
One of the greatest city-states of the Maya was Chichen Itza in the Yucatan peninsula, the central temple of which houses Kukulkan, the rarely but predictably visible snake god. The sun, when it hits the stairs of the temple at Chichen Itza just right, creates the humps and bumps of an enormous snake, cascading down the temple wall. The feathered serpent god is revealed only at equinox.
As the days continue to get shorter, and darkness encroaches, remember that darkness does not flow into light. Winter is coming, but light spreads into darkness, not the other way around.
Unless you live either in the era of Big Science (as we do), or in the time and space where local astronomers have done the heavy lifting for you, and created a physical calendar out of sunlight and stone, you would be hard-pressed to know precisely when the equinox is. But still, you can feel it at a less precise level. There is a quickening, isn’t there. A change in the air. Test and defend. Linger and subvert. Manifest.
The languid days of Summer are loosening their grip. Now, finally, you can get some things done.
This piece was first published last year in the second issue of County Highway. I cannot recommend this publication highly enough. I write their Field Notes column. Please, if you do not know County Highway—go become familiar with it. It is likely to be available in an independent book store, or music store, or feed store, near you (and if not—ask them if they’ll carry it—it’s a very good deal for the retailers). Then, when you find how remarkable County Highway is, subscribe, and be ready for a delightful read every two months, a newspaper that comes all ready for you to read it on the porch with a cup of coffee, or a glass of bourbon, or anytime in between.
(You must supply the porch, the coffee, and the bourbon.)
Also relevant is this from 2021: Based Tranquility: What has the moon ever done for us?
The moon is full right now. If you did not know that already, you should be spending more time outside at night.
This year, the North American autumnal equinox is on September 22. If you are reading this the day it is published, on September 17, you still have a few more days of Summer.
This is a delightful and lovely read! Poetry.
Biologists are not supposed to be such eloquent, poetic writers. I guess Heather didn't get the memo. She was probably in some jungle when the memo came out. I think I like jungles.