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January 6: Feast of Sirona, the blessing of the waters.

January 11: Carmentalia, a woman’s festival celebrating midwifery and birth.

The Ariadne's Tribe sacred calendar doesn't look like the eightfold Wheel of the Year that many modern Pagans are familiar with. Instead, we based our calendar specifically on Mediterranean seasonal cycles (the Minoans came from the island of Crete in the Mediterranean) as well as archaeological and ethnological evidence about the Minoans' religious practices.

So instead of a neatly balanced eight-spoke wheel, our calendar has some festivals that are spread out across the months and others that cluster together. One of those clusters - the biggest one - is my focus today.

Perfect balance returns, light and dark in harmony again for the final harvest. As we wheel in the last-lit days of seasonal symmetry, face the coming darkness together with gratitude for what we've learned about light. Autumn's grain is spring's seed; paradox surrounds us with ripening wisdom. If we lose hope, remember that Hope has two daughters to support our balancing acts: Anger and Courage. Instead of passive hope, embrace radical willingness. The good news is that an organism under attach creates blooming antibodies, devoted to restoring original health to the world's immune system. Activists are that devotion. 

The season of barrenness mists her breath on our window panes—a foreshadowing—yet we're full of our gathering visions. What holds you back? Every minus is a plus that just needs a stroke of vertical awareness. Awake, ask what you do want to harvest into your life? Find the courage to move forward into action. Science and love, the two most powerful poles of humanity have been fiercely separated. The truth is, we're all connected; the greatest disability is, we don't believe this. Believe it. Practice powerful participation in the great circus of life. Find balance on the wild trapeze. 

Greetings all, readers! It is finally the Spring Equinox, also known in Germanic traditions as Ostara (from which the name Easter derives, though not the holiday). Either regarded as the start of spring or its midpoint, the Spring Equinox is widely regarded around the world as an important occasion for when the days begin to grow longer than the nights and the natural world begins to blossom in full.

As we always do we’ve gathered all of our related posts as well as those from around the internet we thought you might enjoy . We hope you have a great time this spring!

-Aryós Héngwis

Dorrie Joy (Somerset, UK) is a mother, grandmother and lover of the wild earth, an artist and traditional craftswoman creating sacred space for her woman and girls.

I live in the northern hemisphere, in the southeastern US, and here it's Spring Equinox today. But in the southern hemisphere it's Autumn Equinox. And even more confusingly, in the Mediterranean, even though we still call it the Spring Equinox, it's harvest time, so in Ariadne's Tribe we acknowledge the grain harvest festival on this day.

Allow me to explain...

The Spring Equinox or vernal equinox occurs between 20 - 22 March. The word equinox is Latin for "equal night". It is also known as Ostara, Eostre or by its Welsh name, Alban Eiler, "the light on the earth". It is a time when day and night are of equal length, and the sun rises and sets due east and west respectively. In secular society, the spring equinox marks the first days of spring, but as we've seen above, Imbolc is actually when the first signs appear, at least in Britain.