(Artwork by Donald Engstrom)
Fall equinox 2025
Yesterday was the Fall Equinox, the time when day and night are equal, marking the official end of summer and the beginning of autumn. The kids are back in school, summer vacations are over, it’s time to settle back into ordinary life. Day and night, light and dark are in balance.
In many places of the world, the equinox is a pivot point between the warmth of summer and the cold of winter. Here in Northern California, it’s the pivot point between dry and wet. In a lucky year, once the equinox has passed, we can hope for the rains to return. In a good year, they come early, reducing the threat of fire. In a bad year they come very late. The already dry vegetation gets drier, and those are the years when the most devastating fires occur, especially when we get a combination of intense autumn heat and wind. Our prayer at this time of year is always “Please, Weather Gods, not this year! Don’t let this year be one of those years. Please send us rain!”
Balance brings to mind a set of scales, like those held by the figure of Justice. She weighs our deeds, and decides what is true or false, what reparations are needed to balance misdeeds, what repair can balance harm. ‘Fair’ and ‘balance’ have a lot in common, despite being the motto of Fox News, which is neither. (Nor is it truly news—it’s more in the nature of some unholy marriage of propaganda and entertainment—propatainment?)
In nature, energy flows are in balance as they circulate throughout an ecosystem. Solar energy, water, nutrient flows, all are traded back and forth in intricate webs in which one thing’s waste becomes another’s resource. No one element of the system tries to amass all the nutrients or hoard all the energy. Were it to do so, the system would collapse.
And yet in our human systems that’s exactly what is happening. Wealth inequality has reached extremes where the top 1% of the world’s population owns half the world’s wealth—and the bottom half owns only 1%! It’s a warped system that rests on a false idea that accumulating more and more, even at the expense of others, will somehow make us happy. And yet as philosophers, religion, and popular songs tell us, money can’t buy you love. Happiness comes not from amassing things but from the quality of our relationships.
Relationships are based on a balance of giving and taking, a reciprocal flow. The Equinox is a good time to reflect on the relationships in our own lives. Are they balanced? If you are doing either most of the giving or the bulk of the taking, that relationship probably isn’t truly nourishing and won’t last. Draw on the power of this liminal time to draw in the strength and the courage you need to shift and change those patterns.
It’s also time to reflect on the balances, or lack thereof, in our common life. The economic imbalance is one of the roots of our discontent, that feeds the sense of grievance that is eroding out democracy and undermining people’s motivation to defend it. After all, if democracy does not mean a fair share of resources and rewards, what good is it?
In permaculture we talk about three core ethics: earth, people care, and fair share: taking enough so that you can thrive, but not taking more than enough, and returning the surplus back to nourish the whole.
What would the world look like if fair share were the basis of our economics rather than endless accumulation? If workers received a fair share of the profits of their labor? If the resources of the earth were fairly distributed? If our goal as a society, as a world, were to ensure that everyone has the basic necessities of life: food, water, shelter, education, meaningful work, leisure and pleasure, opportunities to contribute their best gifts and be valued? If no one were allowed to accumulate too much when others did not have enough?
Maybe we are using the wrong set of scales, the wrong values, to weigh our actions? When you already have more than you need, yet are driven to acquire more and more, that’s an addiction. We are letting the insatiable addiction of the few determine our politics, our morality, our laws and our aspirations. It’s as if we’d turned over the world to a bunch of alcoholics who are remaking it to ensure their supply. Yet that metaphor fails, because even the most devoted drinker can only consume so much, while a billionaire’s addiction to money and power knows no limits—unless we create some.
What if we used a different measure? If we asked, does this action create beneficial relations? Does it create more equity, a more equal flow of resources and energies? Is it fair and just? Will it cause suffering and harm, or bring healing and regeneration?
The ancient Egyptians believed that, after death, the jackal-headed God Anubis would weigh your heart against a feather that represented Ma’at, the principle of justice and balance. If your heart was virtuous, it would be light, and you would be admitted to the Realm of the Dead. If your heart was weighed down with selfishness and guilt, your soul would be devoured.
It can be comforting to believe that the greedy and selfish will face judgment after death, since justice seems so lacking in this world. But our assignment, if we truly understand it and accept it, is to bring justice alive into this world, to forge the scales of true, life-giving values, to live by them and use them to weigh the actions which can bring us to a better world. Let us use the power of the equinoctial tides to give us the vision and courage we need to create a world that is equitable and just, where the powerful are held to account and the powerless are empowered. May the rains come soon, may the fruits be abundant, and may we all come to realize that we all flourish when what we harvest is fairly shared.
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This post has been syndicated from Starhawk’s Substack, where it was published under this address.