The
Vernal Equinox happens on March 20, 2007
Seven
Easy Ways to Celebrate Spring Equinox
by Kim Pearson
The Spring
Equinox, sometimes known as Ostara, falls on March 21st. The nights
and days are of equal length. All is in perfect balance. This is the
season sacred to childhood; of bunnies and eggs and all things
young.
In the
Northern Hemisphere, there are buds on every tree. Daffodil and
tulip stalks are poking out of the ground, and some have begun to
bloom. This is the time to celebrate childhood joys and the sense of
infinite possibility.
Here are seven
simple ideas for celebrating this young and bloomy time of year:
1. Demonstrate
the balance of the earth. Take a raw egg outside to a flat piece of
ground. Stand the egg on its tip. It will not tip over. It will
balance! This never fails to amaze people, but it really does work.
2. Wear pastel
colors. Pink, minty green, lavender, pale yellow, baby blue - think
young!
3. Eat eggs.
Make an omelet or an egg custard for dinner.
4. For sheer
fun, nothing is better than the ancient custom of dying or
decorating eggs. You can use an egg dying kit, or paint them with
acrylics, watercolors, marker pens, or even colored pencils. (Just
don't press too hard on those tender shells.) If you want to keep
your eggs for a long time, blow out the inside of the eggs first,
and then paint, varnish and decorate the shells with ribbons, beads,
dried leaves or flowers, or found objects. To blow eggs, make a
small hole in the tip of the shell of a raw egg with a needle. Make
another hole at the other end. Blow in one end and the raw egg will
flow out the other. You might have to blow hard, especially in the
beginning. It sometimes helps to scramble the egg yolk sac inside
the egg by sticking the needle far down the hole and wiggling it
around.
5. After
you've made your beautiful eggs, make an Ostara tree by tying the
eggs onto branches of a tree outside, or bring a small tree inside
for this purpose.
6. Spring has
been a source of inspiration to poets for centuries. Find some poems
about spring and recite them aloud, preferably outdoors.
7. Write your
own poetry about the Spring. Try haiku, an ancient Japanese
poetry-art form. Haiku consist of three unrhymed lines of five,
seven and five syllables. Here are three haiku about Spring to give
you the idea:
Out of the
spring dirt waxy stalks of peonies awakening worms
when the
spring winds come take care: don't lose your old dreams in love
with the new
it's a
daffodil bursting yellow from the ground a true born-again
Holidays are
days made holy by the attention we pay them. Simple practices such
as the ones listed above remind us that we too dance to the natural
rhythms of the earth.
Kim Pearson is
an author and ghostwriter who has ghostwritten or edited more than
30 non-fiction books and memoirs, plus authoring 7 books of fiction,
poetry and non-fiction of her own.
For more
information click here.
The 2007 Spring
Equinox happens on March 20, precisely at 8:07 P.M. EDT. March 21 is
the first full day of spring, but many people will celebrate the
event on Saturday, March 24th. When it comes to the rites of spring,
enthusiasm is usually more important than precision. -Ed.
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