Equinox Night
A strange night, under a strange moon.
I drifted out into the garden, lured by the light.
She was waxing gibbous; a perfect three quarters. Bulging across the sky.
The night was full of dark shadows, the lawn alive with silver, luminous as snow.
I leaned my body into a chair and rested deeply.
There was dead stillness, as if wind had never been. A silence which was full of sounds.
I breathed.
Into the silence, a bird was singing. A bird?
It was half-past nine, dusk had surrendered to the rising night long ago. Orion was wheeling his way towards the western horizon, conjuring old memories of night-time journeys as a child. Stuffed into the back of the car with my sisters, we’d gaze up at the pinpoint markers of Orion’s belt; look see, one, two, three.
Radiant starlight. Warmth and darkness. Singing, Shine Jesus Shine.
But it’s a songbird that’s trilling his way down to the underworld now, for the night is so full with silvery moonlight that she thinks it is dawn. I wait for her to realise her error, but she’s sure, she keeps on.
Out of the darkness comes a barn owl’s soft hooting. It’s so still I hear the wings of a moth, flicking around somewhere close to my ear.
I, holding the silence, wait and listen.
A child bounces a basketball as though it were day.
My neighbour gargles as he brushes his teeth, preparing to sleep.
Still, the bird trills.
Church bells ring across the valley, echoing in silent air.
I gaze up into the black arms of the maple as she reaches up into the arc of the heavens; the infinite indigo is melting with stars.
Paradox.
Equinox.
Gathered at Earth’s tipping point, she holds the balance of light and dark and she welcomes everything. The contradiction of opposites, effortlessly held.
One.
I feel myself, resting and breathing in my body, absorbing everything, allowing everything. Alive to the night, open, inhabiting the mystical bones of the equinox itself.
Myself as equinox.
Just breathe.
Melting back into the dark garden, I thought of other moments like this, moments inside the practice of yoga nidra, holding the polarity of life within my own body, traversing the mindscape and feeling the fullness of emotions, integrating and balancing it all.
Holding everything. Heaviness and lightness; despair and hope; fear and faith; grief and joy.
The duality of opposites and the one, unified field holding it all.
This is the message and the invitation of equinox, as it is of yoga nidra (yogic sleep). Experiencing life in all of its flavours, all of its contradictions, beyond the rules and the duality of ‘bad’ or ‘good’, light or dark, simply human or fully divine.
All of it. Everything. All at once.
It’s the practice of our lives, holding the tensions of everything, the aching depths and the soaring highs, and everything that struggles in between… the baffling strangeness of existing on this planet, at this time.
Learning to hold it all in this body, this flesh, this star-born matter in which I come alive.
It’s the practice of yoga nidra which teaches me this most deeply, so here is one of mine to support you on your own journey. It’s one of my favourites, born out of another luminous night, under another strange moon. (It’s also here on the meditation app, Insight Timer.)
Yoga Nidra, ‘Core of You’
Miranda Ruth Gill, July 2022
Music: ‘Our Tribe is Free’, licensed by Music of Wisdom
Come and rest with me a while in strangeness, if you will.
Embracing everything. Holding it all.
Miranda x
P.S. If you’d like to learn more about yoga nidra first, you’ll find it here.