Light and dark. Some of us like to live in the light alone, and have been told that the darkness is scary. That we can’t handle it there. That we’ll die of fright.

But the time of the equinox, when dark and light are perfectly balanced, and we stand on the threshold of shorter days and longer nights, is a perfect opportunity for us to pause, take a deep breath, and get ready to plunge into fall, and then to fall into winter.

There are so many myths that honor this tradition. Persephone, when she goes (or is dragged, depending on your interpretation) into the Underworld by Pluto, brings on, through the sorrow of her mother, the Goddess Demeter, the dying of all the plants, the cold, the winter, the dark.

The book we’ve made, Descent, has Persephone’s tale rolled in to it. We use this as a metaphor for anything bad that happens to you, and how that’s a fall from the regular old daily plane of life into a deeper, darker, more mysterious one.

Being a human on the planet is about balance. And not in the balance your diet and exercise way or even the balance your self care with your social justice work, though those are important too. But those are still about control. And the equinox perches us in a balanced moment that reminds us there is much we don’t control: the turning of the earth, the sun, the way shadows elongate and shrink depending on the time of year, for starters.

Chart your shadow as it moves across the ground and you will see that it is always changing.