Nowadays most folks can’t get from point A to point B without their GPS. There’s no sense of geography or direction. Who can intuitively point to north let alone describe the difference between “true north” and “magnetic north?” Add to that the likely fact that many folks can’t name the 50 states or identify them on a map. Forget naming river basins or where they flow, or other earth features. And then there’s the sun.

This post is in omage a moment in time of equalness, balance, and anticipation. We get that moment twice a year. This moment doesn’t discriminate. There isn’t a person on earth it doesn’t touch. Think of equal parts light and dark as the sun crosses the equator. Equal parts on the globe north and south. We all share the light and we all share the dark. There’s no political or legal or business arrangement for that, it’s just the way it is. So at 9:54 PM on September 22nd the sun will be directly above the equator which isn’t a “real” line but itself something of a marvel given we all live on a little ball of rock and water that some reverently call Mother Earth or The Creation, while others call it global economic space.

Regrettably, to a growing number of us, mostly of course those living in what’s called the “developed” world, we’re losing our awareness of the world around us and our place in it to technology, to spectacle, to entertainment. But some others of us are tuning in.

We really admire what the good people at Poor Handmaids for Jesus Christ up in Indiana have done with their solar. While most big solar farms have motor and computer driven mechanisms that tilt the solar panels toward the sun (at a cost), our friends used manual tilt racks made locally by the hands of local people and they plan to hold a ceremony each equinox and solstice to tilt their solar panels following the sun’s seasonal arc. It’s a way to help people understand their relation to the land and the heavens and each other. Great teaching. Great reverence. Great stewardship.