The Vernal Equinox happens on March 20, 2007

Seven Easy Ways to Celebrate Spring Equinox

by Kim Pearson

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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.