Insights from Taoism and the Five Elements

Today as I write my toes dangle over the edge of the midpoint of the light and in the swirling belly of an eclipse portal. This years Spring Equinox is a timeless borderland, an elastic space where nothing feels certain and everything feels possible. We have reached the point in the ‘Great Year’ (a new age reference to the procession of the Equinox) where the world tilts and trembles in the final degrees of the journey between Pole Stars. These star ‘Ages’ are nothing new to us; The Stone Age, Bronze and Medievil manifestations just for starters - its just that we never thought for a moment we would be living in the crossover zone. Here the old guard, made primarily of men of wealth and rank, buckles under its own weight and the inevitability of its fall. This chaos that moves with increasing volume is the hallmark of these days, and how we choose to interpret it the mark of our character and the litmus of our maturity and evolution.

Chaos, from the Greek word ‘abyss’ talks to us of the emptiness before things come into being, of the black single dark of the womb in the moment before conception fills it with life, of the cold chasm of Winter before spring rises anew. While winter might reference the emptiness of chaos, its swirling black and the stone realms of the Calliach, Imbolc speaks to the emergence of Light as one gives way to another, and Equinox holds it all in equal measure from pole to pole and right through the equator. This 3 - 9 day pause is a fleeting global moment in the churning of Yin and Yang offering a wholly magical zone where, between all our ordinary pursuits, something shifts. A wheel turns, and with it, so do we.

Right now the sun rises in front of me golden and bold, and the moon sets at my back, honeied and full. We are teetering, suspended at a singular balance point where all tides converge. The whole of the cosmos hums with the singulaity of it while it invites us, most earnestly, to do the same.

The Sound of Equinox

Every Equinox has a liminality all of its own as it portals in potential and casts off all that is spent and spun. It’s gossamer, with the viscosity of fairy floss, and to describe it is like trying to catch the wind in a cup, yet there it is - beyond language but not beyond sense, unnamed but absolutely known.

These are frequency harmony days where the leylines have the tendency to thicken and spread, the veils to thin, and time feels strange. The ancients knew to gather at high-frequency portals during the Equinox and Solstice days to harness the extraordinary energetic formations and phenomena that occurred. So convinced were they that the biggest ancient structures known stand on them today - Stone Henge, Angkor Watt, and the pyramids to name just a few.

Between Worlds

At Equinox, everything finds symmetry before the gears begin to grind through the hemispheres once again. It’s the pendulum passing the peak of its arc, it’s every weightless hover before motion resumes. Have you ever watched the pirate ship swing at the fairground, and felt that sensation in your belly as it arced towards gravity and the note that accompanied the rush?

That’s the place we speak of.
You can feel what’s possible here.

This is time and space out of its ordinary forms, a sliding timeline that sits just outside our everyday moments. We used to know the names and the rules of these phenomena, back when we worshipped the water deities at the village well, but now the language is forgotten, lost when we misplaced the magic of it all. While we run errands or hang out laundry Equinox reminds us that there is more unknown than there is known.

The Original Light

With the Spring Equinox comes the emergence of birth and renewal. With the Autumn Equinox, the tolling of the bell at year’s end. Here in early spring, we are beginning again, the last of winter’s dark pulls back, unable to maintain itself against the growing light, and so the world unfurls once more. Spring comes quietly at first, a stirring of something beneath the surface until its soft green pierces woody stems. It’s a story that won’t be found in textbooks or conversations among scholars who prefer to talk of this time in terms of its physical nature - day and night balance, the sun reaches 27 deg of the cardinal etc etc. Instead, its true meaning is a felt space that understands what it means to turn your face to the sun and breathe in the light, to pause in the reflections of the shallows, to play among the light codes that live there.

You see the alchemy of, Spring Equinox is a light field.

Through this window, we are invited to consider what balance and equanimity are, and through that lens the parts we wish to renew and reinvigorate, the places that need a compassionate renovation or even loving demolition. Here we consider who we are, now that we are on the other side of WATER.

This rebirth is a personal journey, one that has at its heart a call to envision something greater for ourselves. Spring serves to coalesce this future visioning, the one that was conceived in the dark liminal of winter, marionated in our original light, and so the best of us on offer to the world for the Becoming phase ahead.

As WATER rises through the earth to create Spring how we will serve in the months that will take us to the Summer Solstice?

Creation initiates

Spring is the season of WOOD energy—the element of growth, expansion, and creativity. It si ‘becoming Yang”, the outward movement of life as it ruptures the surface tension and pulls away from the cover of winter urged on by the Light. The Earth warms, the days lengthen, and we feel the stirring too, an urgency, a pull to create, and inspiration to build and move on.

As nature would have it the WOOD and FIRE phases of the seasonal year are the cycles of output, creativity, light, warmth, and all the aspects of the Divine Masculine. It is where we move outside of ourselves in the name of something greater, and action our lives in service to humanity, to the planet, to God/Source/Spirit.

The Spring Equinox pivot is the re-relationing of ourselves to the outside world now that we have grown and matured. The Imbolc/Equinox points are the stepping stones that guide us annually from one evolutionary manifestation to the next. You see, we are not here by this divine authority to work for the machine and pay bills for the privilege. Instead, we are protagonists in a new mythology and busy scripting the future.

As we fall through time between marble statues of Greek Gods, past petroglyphs in ancient caves, rifts, pyramids, whale songs, and the musty smell of old books, what we are here to discover and live into is who become cycle after cycle.  

Spring invites us to reflect on the gifts we’ve honed, the tools we will carry forward and the crops we will nourish. To consider deeply the container that holds our unique expression, and then to offer it freely out into a world aching to shed the algorithm for beautifully random nature of authenticity and sovereinty.

To balance is to begin again

Here retreating winter merges with the wide horizon of Spring. We hold the wisdom of the deep in equal measure with potential and possibility where the dreamer and the creative are alive and well.

It’s no accident that from our winter-born wholeness, we come to the threshold of growth and evolution. The Equinox and the churning space between eclipses - renewed, re-learned, re-schooled.

Imbolc being the moment we step up.
Equinox being the moment we step out.

Yx