
It's like the light
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Candlemas / Groundhog Day
I've often quoted the remark from Owen Barfield, made quite late in his long life, to the effect that the greatest gift from his lifelong study of Rudolf Steiner's work was a deeper consciousness of the soul-reality of the course of the year, meaning, in part, the ever-transforming relationship, or dance, of light and dark, night and day, earth and sun, which is just as much a part of nature, or the living, interconnected miracle of creation, as mountains, oceans, forests, flora, fauna, and all the rest.
It would seem that the relationship between light and dark through the course of the year is less prone to human manipulation than our more tangible, earthly nature. Although we can and do pollute our rivers and even flatten our mountains, we cannot, in reality, alter the ever-varying length of our days and nights throughout the year relative to our distance from the equator, despite being continually told, absent both basic logic and any consciousness of the cycle of the year, that this is possible. This deceit is just one of a thousand reasons to put an end to the illusory, mandated custom of "Daylight Saving" time and to oppose, especially, something called the "Sunshine Protection Act," which aims to eliminate our already short three months of Standard Time and switch to "permanent DST," a proposal even more cruel than the current arrangement, unless you live in Arizona.
I'm reminded of this subject each year, especially at this particular "cross-quarter" day, because the sunlight that has been increasing since the Winter Solstice becomes now so palpable and evident. Here on our northerly US homestead, it's not uncommon for the chickens to lay their first eggs of spring, and one can feel the old maple trees beginning to draw up their forces we know as sap.
Further, it has struck me this year, after a lifetime of being asleep to this seemingly minor point, that a more honest reckoning might place the "beginning" of spring on this very day, as it seems was even once the case, before such definite notions of endings and beginnings became so fixed, and notwithstanding the simultaneity of the fact that winter is not yet completely "gone."
The coming equinox is, in a real sense, not the true beginning of spring, but rather the culmination of the heightened balance that is spring, just as the solstices occur, not at the beginning, but in the middle of winter and summer, as our poets have been telling us all along (think of Rossetti's "In the Bleak Midwinter" and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream), meaning that, according to this perspective, we can reckon a soft start—or call it a blending of the old and the new—to the four seasons at, roughly, the old cross-quarter days.
Or maybe it's just that we need new ways of observing these days, inwardly and consciously, which will become apparent once we recognize the soul-reality of the cycle of the year itself, not in imitation of the ancients, but out of a modern consciousness, no longer asleep or in denial, but enriched by spiritual science.
—John-Scott