Equinox occurred Sunday morning, when the Sun appeared to slip below the celestial equator and now, in the northern hemisphere, we enter the season of shorter days and longer nights.
But that’s not all.
Now the moon takes the lead in our sky, which means that from now until March next year, we will experience a great deal more reflected light coming toward us. And this makes the poets dream.
When we reach the season of autumn bold, as John Keats described it, with its universal tinge of sober gold, then we may, like the lead character of his poem, Endymion, fall in love with the moon and with night, and, like Shakespeare’s Juliet, pay no worship to the garish sun.
Or then there’s John Donne, who wrote No spring, nor summer beauty hath such grace, as I have seen in one autumnal face.
Throughout the coming months, every full moon will occur among the constellations where the sun had been during the summer months. It’s as though the moon is gathering all the light that the sun placed there among the stars, and offers it to us for inner reflection.
The moon is always facing forward as it does this, toward the Earth, though it is moving along its own circuitous path. Such harmony of relationship makes of the Moon the consummate poet, and as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: The experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet.
This week the moon is a waning gibbous, moving past Jupiter and Mars, then Gemini stars in the morning sky, and hour before the autumn sun rises.
