Harvest/Fall Equinox THE WONDER: Science-Based Paganism

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S3E31 TRANSCRIPT:----more----
Mark: Welcome back to the wonder science based paganism. I'm your host mark.
Yucca: And I'm Yucca.
Mark: And today we are celebrating the autumnal Equinox, which goes by various other names. I like to call it harvest myself. And the. The holiday is one of the roughly equivalent length of the day and the night around the 20th of September.
And so it's a time when we celebrate many metaphorical meanings of that. And we also observe a lot of what's going on in our natural environment. At this time, as in the Northern hemisphere, we moved from summer into. Into the autumn. So we're gonna be talking about that today and celebrating the holiday,
Yucca: Right. And as always, it's just amazing that we're here already.
Mark: right.
Yucca: is just, just flown by. So,
Mark: It really has. It's. Well, it's extraordinary. I mean, a as you know, Yucca, I've been unemployed now for almost 14 months.
Yucca: wow.
Mark: And I mean, on the one hand, it seems like all the time in the world, but on the other hand, it's like, well, that's kind of flown by in a way it's involved a lot of struggle, but it's. leading to some good things. Now that I'll talk about later on. So I'm, I'm feeling like this is the harvesting season. It's the time when I'm, you know, reaping the benefits of stuff that I've had in the ground for a long time and have really been working to tend.
Yucca: Hmm. That's exciting. Yeah. So for us, and we should mention being in the Northern hemisphere, this is the autumn for us. Although we do see that there are quite a few of you listening from the Southern hemisphere. So for everybody in the Southern hemisphere, it's the other side of the wheel,
Mark: Happy
Yucca: So happy spring.
But for us to September. We're talking about how fast the year goes, but September seems to just really fly by for, with us starting September. It's still summer by the end of September, it's we're full in autumn. It's winter's right at our doorstep, right? It's a, we get a very kind of short autumn and it's says, Nope, here we are.
It's fall. And this is actually one of my very favorite times of the. And I know a lot of people really, really love this time, but let's actually start with what is this holiday often represent in the broader pagan community. And then we can get into our individual practices and, and observances around it.
Mark: Sure. That sounds great. Well, traditionally, this is viewed as the second harvest of the three harvest festivals. The first being the holiday at the beginning of August which is. The grain harvest and so beer and bread and all those kinds of things. Well, this is the second harvest and it it's often conceptualized as the overflowing corn utopia of vegetables, right?
The vegetable gardens are pouring out all of the winter squash and the tomatoes are still really going. And there's all these
Yucca: zucchini. So many zucchini
Mark: so many zucchini, same numbers of zucchinis. You've got, you know, people door ditching zucchini to everyone else. And so it's a time of a great abundance of food.
Much of which is perishable and is not really gonna last into the winter. And so traditionally it was a time when you ate a lot, right? You, you, you put as much, you stored as much of that stuff as you could, like the winter squashes and so forth, but what you couldn't, you ate, you put on your body as, as much as you could in order to kind of fatten up for the winter.
Yucca: Right. This is also the, the time of year where they're the most babies born. So you would think that it would be pretty evenly distributed throughout the year, but we actually see in the August, September, right in this area, right before we're going into the, the season is really switching into that cold time when we see a lot more births.
Mark: that kind of makes sense. Because if this is the time of year, more than any