Equinox Earth & Sky

Vernal Equinox:
High Noon With Flying Saucer

"Late, late yestreen I saw the new moon,
With the old Moon in her arms . . ."

from "The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens"

I have been celebrating the Vernal Equinox
by rereading my favorite sections
and random quotations
from Another Roadside Attraction
by Tom Robbins:

Tarzan explains paganism to Jesus
(excerpt from Part IV, 302 - 304)

"Nothing in the vegetable world succumbs. It simply drops away and then returns. Energy is never destroyed. We planted our dead the way we planted our seeds. After a period of rest, the energy of corpse or seed returned in one form or another. From death came more life. We loved the earth because of the joy and good times and peace of mind to be had in loving it. We didn’t have to be ‘saved’ from it. We never plotted escapes to Heaven. We weren’t afraid of death because we adhered to nature and its cycles. In nature we observed that death is an inseparable part of life. . . .

"We even figured out, in our funky way, how the sun and moon and stars fit into the process. We didn’t draw distinctions between the generative activity of seeds and the procreative cycles of animals. We observed that growth and change were essential to everything in life, and since we dug life, when it came time to satisfy our inner needs we naturally enough based our religion on the transformations of nature. We were direct about it. Went right to the source. The power to grow and transform was not attributed to abstract spirits – to a magnified ego extension in the sky – but was present in the fecundity of nature. We worshiped the reproductive organs of plants and animals. ‘Cause that’s where the life force lies. . . .

"Life is reproduced from life, while resurrection – the regeneration of seeds, the return in the spring of the leaves that fell in the autumn – is of matter, not of spirit. Unsophisticated? Maybe it’s unsophisticated to venerate mountains and regard rivers as sacred, but as long as we think of our natural environment as holy, then we're gonna respect it and not sell it out or foul it up. Unsophisticated? . . . we had respect even for stones."