Between naps, I quickly read two saucy man-on-man murder mysteries set in a magical Victorian England (the “Charm of Magpies” series, by K.J. Charles) and finished up a re-read of “The Mists of Avalon” (which says less about imagined British Paganisms and The Goddess than I’d recalled, and could be paraphrased “Morgaine and her certainty are the common factors in all her failed, betrayal-filled relationships.”)
So this Equinox there was no dancing in a magic circle, nor harping under moonlight, nor meditating while incense floated around me.
However, on the Equinox, Mark and I did go for a long walk along the Willamette River and to Delta Ponds. As we were walking along the gravel path between the two bridges on the south end of the Ponds, I looked out on a strip of water running between two marshy beds of river grass. It was a little after the sun was in its meridian. A dark egret stood on the eastern bank, facing a white heron on the western bank. The two birds facing each other put me in mind of the Middle Kingdom hieroglyph for the horizon 𓈌 , although I believe two animals back-to-back more commonly hint at it in Egyptian art. Still, it was a striking image — almost like a tableau from tarot card — that seemed to signify the Equinox. I stopped to pay better attention to it; fixing the curving the shining water between the green grasses, a shadowy neck, white wings, narrow beaks, and the symmetry between the birds in my mind.
And like the tarot, it was telling me something I already knew: the day was the day when the balance of the season would shift into shadow.
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