Rumination on the Vernal Equinox

Happy Vernal Equinox!

Well, really it is tomorrow (Mar 21), but since it is based on Greenwich Mean Time, in the U.S. it falls at about 8:07 PM tonight. There is something so frightening about the universe, or at least our little piece of it, coming together in such a brilliant alignment.

Little-known fact about me: I kind of loosely follow nerdy things like eclipses, meteor showers, the equinox, etc. I can lose hours reading The Old Farmer's Almanac. I think there is something almost romantic about the lost art of following astronomy, and of having an appreciation for the changing of the seasons. Just a hundred years ago, people really paid attention to first and last freezes, moon phases, and the like. These things had great bearing on when and where and how crops were planted and harvested. Now, we never pay a bit of attention. We just buy our wilted, pesticide-treated lettuce at Kroger with not a thought of how it came to be there.

Here is this amazing knowledge and tradition, followed for thousands of years, and then lost in the blink of an eye that is the 20th century.

Okay, off to put the kids back in the crate and take a few more bong hits.