Happy Autumnal Equinox

Happy Autumnal Equinox everybody!

I've been remiss in posting here and I think it's one of those snowball things. I didn't post for a while, then I was too embarrassed to post with out something meaningful to say, then I had some good stuff to say but I didn't have time to type them up well. You know the story.

With Autumn upon us, it is almost Cthulhu month, so you know I'll be posting daily then, but I think it may be more of a habit thing. I need to get into the habit of posting, then it will work better.

One of my colleagues here at work took the day off for Autumnal Equinox. He said he was just going to walk around. I like that idea. Every now and then my Dad would take us out of school and we would go for a walk in the forest preserves. He said that sometimes it was more important to have days like that than to be in school. In retrospect, these days may have been after particularly harrowing days at work (he was a Chicago Cop), but I only remember them as great little hikes, usually in the fall.

I really like the idea of communing with nature that way, just getting out and being. I try to remember and observe the solstices and equinoxes because I think in modern life we have alienated ourselves so much from nature that we forget that if the sun and earth didn't play nice this way, none of us would be here. School starts well before Labor Day and ends with no regard to Memorial Day (the traditional bookends of summer around where I live) and work just goes on and on with absolutely no regard to season, day or night, we'll just adjust the HVAC and Daylight Savings Time. The celestial holidays are REAL. We can hide in our buildings and ignore them, but they are happening, and we should pay attention.

That's Demeter in the picture, by the way, the goddess of the harvest. In Greek mythology this is the day that her daughter Persephone returns to the underworld and her husband Hades for the winter months. It was sort of a plea bargain after Hades kidnapped Persephone was that he would share her with Demeter, thus giving us the seasons.