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Remember, we welcome comments, questions, and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com.\nS4E9 TRANSCRIPT:----more----\n\xa0\nYucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts Yucca,\xa0\nMark: and I'm the other one. Mark,\xa0\nYucca: and today it's time to talk about the Equinox.\xa0\nMark: Yes, we have arrived.\xa0\nYucca: Yep. So I think a good place to start is of course, well, what is this Equinox thing\xa0\nMark: right? Yeah, well, the, the, the, the Latin roots of the word of course mean equal night which implies what it is, which is that at the equator anyway.\nMm-hmm. , the days and the nights are equal, equal in length. They're both 12 hours long. Now, as you get further up in the latitudes, that changes a little bit, but by and large, the days are roughly the same length as the nights. Right at this point in the year. Yeah.\xa0\nYucca: And for both of us, we're in the Northern Hemisphere.\nMm-hmm. . So this is going into the spring for us. And on the calendars, the Equinox marks the first day of spring. . However, that's gonna really depend on your climate as to whether it's actually spring or not, right? So for you, it is, right? It's been\xa0\nMark: spring. It's been spring for a while. All the fruit trees are blooming.\nThe early wildflowers are up. The hills are all green. The creeks are all roaring with water because we've. Big banner, year for rain here in California, thankfully. Mm-hmm. . So yes, spring has been here for a while, and the February holiday, which has many names that I call River Rain really was a rain holiday this year.\nSo that was the beginning of our spring, right? This is the height of spring for us. But for you,\xa0\nYucca: It's, it's the time of year where it can't quite make up its mind, whether it's spring or winter, it feels like spring. Some of the time the, the bird songs have come, the spring bird songs are here, and that's what makes it really feel like spring, but, We won't have in terms of plant growth and things like that, that won't, we're still a ways out for that.\nWe won't be getting flowers. A few of. There aren't many deciduous trees here. A few of them you can start to see just the tiniest hints of maybe they're starting to wake up, make some little mm-hmm. thinking about moving in that direction. But it, it won't be past until past Beltane that we stop freezing every night.\nMm-hmm. it won't be till mid May. Really? Yeah. But it, it's feeling like spring is gonna be, . It's like we're almost there. There's more light. There's the birds starting to sing. The, the males are getting their colors back. Mm-hmm. , right? The ones that stay here in the winter of the, the songbirds that get very muted and dull in the winter.\nwhich I think is a, just a way of protecting themselves. Sure. They don't, they're not needing to be mating, so it's better to blend in and be a little bit less visible to those coyotes and\xa0\nMark: fox. You don't wanna be dancing around wearing red feathers on top of snow. That's a bad strategy. Yeah. .\xa0\nYucca: So, but it, it definitely is starting to.\nlike spring is coming, but it's not quite there. Mm-hmm. . So\xa0\nMark: do you have the smell of spring yet?\nYucca: You know, spring doesn't have a really distinctive smell to me. Ah. Like it, there definitely are smells that are springy, but it's not like, you know, here we have like a very monsoon smell and there's a definitely a smell for winter, but, I don't think so. Not really.\xa0\nMark: Well here we have a lot of flowering trees and the chairing blossoms and the apple blossoms and things like that.\n, they have a smell. Mm-hmm. and there's, so there's a particular distinctive and also a lot of people plant ornamentals like jasmine and things like that around here. So they're these really perfumey beautiful kind of spring. I\xa0\nYucca: love the smell of jasmine.\xa0\nMark: Yeah. It's So we have. You know, when you start to catch that perfume on the air, you realize, okay, you know, the, the year has started.\nWe ar