Mar 20, 2022
Equinox Meditation
An Equator Experience
Imagine the clouds in the Equatorial sky over Indonesia turning pastel colors as you close your eyes and breath in, turning your attention to the air filling your lungs and then the sensation of it going out through your mouth past your lips.
Imagine the simplest view of a little ball in the blank space before you, not spinning itself, just going around a much bigger ball. Watch it once all the way around.
Now can you imagine the little ball spinning, rotating while it’s going around the much bigger ball?
Let’s imagine the little ball has a bright red belt right around its middle and it’s spinning perfectly straight so the belt is always pointing right at the big ball. One side of the belt, we’ll call it the top, we’ll color Green, a rich Kelly Green, and the other side we’ll make a soft light brown, like Cinnamon.
Now let’s tip the little green and brown ball from the top, just a bit, about 23 degrees, yup, right about there, and you see the rotating and revolving is wobblier now, not the path but the way sometimes now the green part faces the Sun more and sometimes the brown part does.
It’s like The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party –spinning and revolving while tilting.
That’s us!
Twice a year we cross from the Sun being more toward the green than the brown — that’s the Equinox.
This is not a small matter.
The Equinox marks a real event. It is very easy to notice and it signifies a transition of crucial importance. Many forms of life, plant and animal, perceive the point day and night are the same and begin to prepare for changes.
Its meaning comes from its place in a larger cycle. The Vernal or Spring Equinox follows the end-of-year Winter break we need and depend on, and it marks the shift to a time when we can restart certain things.
Of course it is also the Planting time, when we focus on new beginnings and everything is possible.
These rhythms are essential to sustaining life. Our planet has been around much longer than our species and the earth shows us what is needed, what all life needs
Plant … Work … Harvest/Clear… Rest
Plant … Work … Harvest/Clear… Rest
We are part of this natural cycle daily — restarting every morning, working and doing things, finding pleasure, settling down at night.
Also every week, starting with Monday mind. Every month
We are part of nature, not separate Gods and Goddesses looking down on its processes and principles, we just think we are.
There is a Time for every purpose under Heaven is the natural cycle of life that helps us if we let it show us where we are in the cycles.
This is meaning of the Equinox — it reminds us to be mindful of the present moment in a more dynamic way
The Equinox is like a big billboard everywhere drawing attention to the cycles all of Nature expresses all the time, bringing us back to our own cycle of Renewal — the cycle that works
We can use our vision to inform the way we move forward, seeing where things are and where they are headed at the same time, like Megan Rapinoe being so in the Now that she can send a soccer ball where a teammate will be in the future.
So now I invite you to reflect on your Planting season, for whatever period you want. What seeds do you intend to plant? This morning. This Spring, or in 2022, or ever?
What meaning will the Equinox have for you?
And while you reflect let’s travel together around the band where it is always the Equinox, always equal day and night, that we have for one passing day.
We start at 0.0–0 degrees N/S and what we call 0 degrees E/W — the Greenwich so-called Prime Meridien line
To picture where that is imagine the way Africa bulges out at the top — under that bulge is 0.0, in the Gulf of Guinea
We’ll need to be on a boat there, you can pick yours, because the 0.0 point is over water, like much of the Equator is.
We need to move 9 degrees and 20 seconds East, toward Africa, to find where the Equator meets dry land, at the coast of Gabon
At 30 degrees East, 1/12 of our way around, we have already crossed over the Congo and are now in Uganda. Everything has been heavily forested and it still is — game preserves with safari lodges. We pass thru Kenya at the small town of Nanyuki and leave the continent of Africa in Somalia south of Mogadishu
More water, the Indian Ocean, where we come close to land at 60 degrees East near the Maldive Islands, south of India and Sri Lanka.
The Equator does not find land again until the Island of Sumatra, part of Indonesia, at about 100 degrees East. Can you picture Thailand dripping South down into the thin Malay peninsula with Singapore at the tip?
Sumatra is right next to Singapore and at 120 degrees, the Equator stays on land in Indonesia through Sulawesi state until it hits a long stretch of South Pacific Ocean.
At 150 degrees we’re near a teeny dot called Nago island in the South Pacific — and at 180 degrees, half way around the world from we started, we’ve reached the Marshall Islands.
Here we keep referring to 0 degrees North/South, but there’s nothing beyond 180 degrees, so we now move in declining degrees West — 150 degrees West is South of Hawaii.
At 120 degrees West we are just South of where upper Mexico bulges out, still in the Pacific Ocean.
Finally at 90 degrees West we arrive at the Galapagos Islands and soon on the South American Continent, at Equador, which takes the Equator seriously. with the Mital del Mundo monument in Quito. It also has the highest point on the Equator, Mt Cayamba, a snow capped peak, on the Equator.
By 60 degrees West we are in Brazil and by 30 degrees West we back in the Atlantic on the way to 0.0 N/S and E/W where we started.
Our Equinox experience is the every day Equator experience. What other natural rhythms show the ebb and flow of seasons at the Equator? What other rhythms are you tuned into?
I write about VR and other topics I have no standing to write about on Medium and Substack.
I have a black belt in learning and I’ve been meditating for so long you’d think I’d be enlightened but I’m not. I have had a few experiences where my usual filters weren’t in place and I knew all over I’m part of something bigger. Those help.
