Only the Monarch Knows

“Spring must not be permitted to arrive without notice”—to echo what I said in 2013. Every year this day gives me occasion to try understand again why our tilted axis causes the lengthening and shortening of days—and the two midpoints of this recurring cycle produce equal nights and days. On this day also, without fail, I wonder how, under current theories of planetary formation, we explain why our axial tilt exists at all. We watched a good documentary yesterday on Nova titled “The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies,” read Monarchs. Their navigational abilities are still not understood and never may be. Two great puzzles in succeeding days. What bumped the earth in some long night millions of years ago to make it tilt in its rotation?

Spring Marker

Spring must not be permitted to arrive without notice—although it seems still to be obdurately Winter out there. Last year the forsythia and willow were blooming on the day of the Vernal Equinox (that came yesterday); this year not even a hint of color from either. The temperature outdoors this morning is 19° F (-7° C); last year it was 55° F, 13° C. Weather Underground (link) tells me that today is the coldest it has been in a decade on this day. Patience.

Equinocturnal Frustrations

Welcome Spring and so forth. I note that the weather, which cooperated magnificently for about the last two weeks of so-called Winter, refuses to smile today. It’s gray out there, cool, and humid. The weather perhaps shares my frustration at six month intervals when it’s time, once again, to celebrate the equinox. I understand this thing perfectly well in conceptual terms. The sun today is directly above the equator, straight up there in the perpendicular. As time now advances, that angle will become more and more acute, the sun appearing north of the equator until the summer solstice on June 21st. After that, back we go again, the angle increasing until the arrival in September—on the 23rd of that month this year—of the autumnal equinox. Thereafter the angle becomes obtuse (from our point of vantage), the sun beaming south of the equator to the delight of all Patagonians until December 21, the blessed winter solstice. Then it marches back again to March of 2011. I do get all this. Yes. But I can’t picture it properly. It’s all due to the earth’s tilted axis, isn’t it, which puts us now closer to the sun and now removes us farther away in wintertime. Every season—it’s amazing, actually, how this sort of thing fades from memory in six months’ time—I end up getting my ice-pick and an apple, and actually doing a kind of dance around a lamp holding the ice-pick at an angle until my geometrically dense brain finally gets it again. With that comes a moment of satisfaction, but the juices of frustration that came before—while trying to find good visuals on the Internet—linger long enough in my body to yield…well, a post “celebrating” the Vernal Equinox.