We Are Billionaires of Light

Spring arrives with its prosperity gospel, two eclipses, and a Mercury retrograde

Photograph by Thomas Bouillot

Today, March 19th, is the equinox, a very holy day in the geometry of life on a planet, swirling through a cosmos, spinning around an enormous blazing star. On the equinoxes, the dark and the light — and the day and the night — are equal, back in balance, and we enter either Autumn or Spring under the blessing of this balance and rebalancing. This equinox also marks the beginning of Aries season, and is the new year’s day of the Zodiac, a time of energetic commencement. For all my friends in the northern hemisphere, this is also the first day of Spring, the season where death and rebirth do their wild, tangled dance.

That’s where I am at right now, and the season has arrived in a kind of classic fashion. My house has been flooded with bright light for the last five days. It’s actually making me dizzy—light headed—which seems very funny to me. I am light drunk for sure. So are my house plants, who are beaming green signals at me and rapidly growing new fronds and tendrils. I can’t be sure obviously, but I think my body is trying to follow their lead, and turn all this light into sugar. Hence the dizzy drunkenness. If it’s any indication of the metaphor this Spring is riding in on, we should hold on for dear life. Outside, obviously, the same tipsiness has erupted. The magnolias went first, blossoming overnight in very suggestive pinks. Then the neighbors, eddying out onto the sidewalks in floral shorts and fat grins, gathering in clumps and chatting happily and then drifting onward. Like, the whole world was suddenly holding an open container.

The message Spring plants in the body and the psyche is this: you, too, given the return of light and warmth and nutrients, could soften and flower, regreen and grow new limbs and leaves. If you’ve been hunched in a contraction, underground, in the dark; if you’ve been stagnant, stuck somewhere that’s not death but not life either; you, too can surge up and away from your fearful stories into new ways of knowing and opening to knowing. You can hum this heady ditty of trust, and wander back out into the garden of your life. You can have joy, and self-knowledge, and forgiveness, and fuck it. You can lighten up, just like that. Put down the heaviness you’ve been carrying, at least for now. Step into this opening, this present moment.