The Equinox: The Moment of Balance That Cannot Last

Why “Equal Night”?

The word Equinox contains something worth contemplating.

Equinox comes from the Latin aequinoctium: aequus (“equal”) + nox/noctis (“night”). So, essentially, “equal night.” Not “equal day.”

The term refers to the time when night becomes approximately equal to day. Interestingly, the date when day and night are actually closest to equal is sometimes called the Equilux.

The word Equinox gives the night equal standing. Darkness is not simply the absence of something else. For this brief moment, it carries equal weight. For one fleeting moment at the Equinox, even the night stands equal on the scales.

Perhaps that is part of the deeper symbolism of the Equinox.

Balance does not require us to eliminate one side of the scales.

Libra’s scales ask us to place both light and darkness on the scales and see the value and need for each. Like any pair of opposites, each has its place.

Light and darkness. Activity and rest. The known and the unknown. The outer world and the inner one. We may prefer one side, fear the other, or judge one as more desirable, but nature contains them both. They are complementary forces that, when they meet in the center, can create balance.

At the Autumnal Equinox, we do not remain at that balance point. We cross it and move toward increasing darkness, beginning the journey inward until we reach the Winter Solstice, when darkness reaches its greatest extent and we experience the longest night of the year.

Typically, I hold my Shamanic Journeying workshop on or near the Equinoxes and Solstices because these are all turning points when the energy is heightened. We stand at the threshold of a shift in energy and can more readily access the unseen, inward, imaginal territory in which journey work operates.

For now, each night becomes longer as we continue our journey toward the Winter Solstice. The outer world begins its seasonal withdrawal, while darkness occupies increasingly more of our twenty-four-hour day.

But the journey into darkness does not continue forever.

At the Winter Solstice, we reach the extreme. Darkness has expanded as far as it can go. The longest night arrives—and then the movement reverses. Almost imperceptibly at first, the days begin to lengthen. The light returns.

So the Autumn Equinox is not simply a moment of balance. It is also the beginning of a passage: balance, descent, darkness, and eventually the return of light.

There is a natural wisdom in that cycle. We are not asked to remain forever in the light, nor are we asked to remain in darkness. There are times for outward movement and times for inward movement; times for seeing clearly and times for entering what is not yet visible.

Journeying asks us to become comfortable entering what cannot be seen with ordinary sight—to cross a threshold from the familiar outer world into an inner landscape and listen for what may be found there.

Perhaps that is why human beings have always paid attention to thresholds. There is something powerful about the place that is neither entirely one thing nor the other.

The Equinox reminds us that balance itself is a threshold.

We arrive there only for a moment.

And then the journey continues.