The Wild Equinox

A reflection on balance, disruption, and the true nature of new creation

There is something almost cosmically ironic about the Spring Equinox.

By definition, the equinox is the moment in the calendar year where day and night find themselves in perfect proportion. Equal parts light and dark. A moment of cosmic balance. And yet, if you live anywhere near the Middlewest, you know that this particular moment arrives not in gentleness, but in something closer to violence.

This year has been no exception. Chicago winter held nothing back -- frigid temperatures, heavy snowfall, and those long gray stretches that make you question whether the sun still exists. And like every year, I found myself longing. Longing for warmth, for color, for that particular quality of light that only spring seems to carry.

But spring, particularly at its onset, has a way of reminding me that it is nothing like what I long for.

What we get instead is whiplash. Suddenly warm days that feel almost jarring, followed immediately by tornadoes, hail, another round of snow. An exhausting oscillation that makes you wonder “Who signed me up for March?”

I’ve started to think that this is exactly the point.

We tend to carry an image of new creation as something gentle. Something that simply arrives. A baby cooing in its mother’s arms. The crocus emerging softly from the soil. The bud slowly unfurling on the branch. And there is beauty in this imagery, certainly. But it misses something essential about what is actually happening.

Because if you look closely at something like the crocus, particularly here in Chicago, you will often find it covered in snow. That small, purple insistence pushing up through a late-season freeze. The contrast obvious -- the tender thing and the hostile thing, sharing the same patch of earth. And yet the crocus doesn’t wait for conditions to improve. It pushes through anyway. Not because the conditions are right, but because the impulse toward life is stronger than the resistance it meets. It resembles a courage that I find both silly and inspiring.

That, I think, is a more honest picture of new creation.

When I look back at the moments in my own life that have carried the most significance -- the real turning points, the places where something genuinely new took root -- they were almost never the moments where I was gently happening across the next thing. They were the dark nights of the soul. The disruptive events that felt almost aggressive in their arrival. Loss. Illness. Financial collapse. Spiritual confusion so thick I couldn’t see a foot in front of me. Moments where something I had counted on simply stopped being available to me.

It is always in hindsight that I can see what those moments were actually doing. Not breaking me down for the sake of breaking. But breaking open. Making room. Clearing out what had grown too dense or too settled to allow anything new to take root.

This is at the heart of all new growth. New creation does not arrive in the absence of difficulty. It arrives through it.

And the Equinox -- this strange, paradoxical moment of cosmic balance -- may be the most honest symbol we have for that truth. It is not a moment of stillness. It is not the arrival of peace after struggle. It is the exact center of the tension, the point where destruction and creation exist in equal proportion, neither one winning, both necessary. It is an invitation not to escape the wildness, but to find your center within it. To locate the eye of the tornado and sit, however unsteadily, inside it.

I realize that might sound terrifying. I know, because I’ve stood at the edge of that eye more than once, and I’ve fled more often than I’d like to admit.

But here is what I’ve learned, or more accurately, what I am still learning: the storms don’t necessarily get easier. The wind doesn’t quiet down just because you’ve been through it before. What changes is the capacity to trust. To know, in some deeper part of yourself, that this has a season. That the particular winter you’re in will not last forever, even when it feels eternal. That the crocus is already pushing up somewhere beneath the frost, whether or not you can see it yet.

That trust doesn’t make you immune to the difficulty. It just gives you something to hold onto while you’re inside it.

The equinox is not the promise that the storm is over. It’s the reminder that you are held inside a cycle larger than the storm. That creation and destruction are not opposites, but partners. That the wildness of spring is not a detour from new life. It is the very form that new life takes.

So this vernal equinox, I want to offer an invitation -- not to seek shelter from the wildness, but to find your center within it. To notice where in your life something is pushing through difficulty right now. To consider that the turbulence may not be the obstacle to what you’re hoping for. It may be the thing carrying it toward you.

I suspect this Dylan Thomas poem captures this all more succinctly.

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.