Ostaraa love letter for the balance of spring

Late March smells like mud. It smells like wet earth and thawing leaves and the first green things pushing up through last year's brown. The snowbanks shrink back into gray little islands. The maples begin to run with sap. Somewhere a robin is standing on a lawn that was buried a week ago, head tilted, listening for what is moving underneath. The air is still cold, but it has changed its mind about being winter.

This is the spring equinox, the moment when the sun crosses the celestial equator and day and night stand nearly equal across the whole earth. I say nearly, because the true moment of equal light usually arrives a few days earlier, thanks to the way our atmosphere bends the sunlight at dawn and dusk. I love that the sky refuses to be perfectly tidy. Balance, it turns out, is never quite exact. It is a meeting, not a measurement.

For one brief moment the year stands balanced, and then the light steps forward.

On the modern Wheel of the Year, the spring equinox is one of the four quarter days, set between Imbolc's first stirring and the full green fire of Beltane. It is the point where the light finally catches up with the dark. For one brief moment the year stands balanced, and then the light steps forward. From here until midsummer, every day will be a little longer than the one before.

Many pagans today call this festival Ostara. The name has a long and winding story, which I will share with you in a moment, but its roots lie in a single sentence about an Anglo-Saxon goddess called Eostre, and in the same old word that gave English its name for Easter. Whatever we call it, the meaning is the same everywhere the seasons turn. The land is waking. The dark has not been defeated, only joined. And we are invited to stand in the middle, with one hand in each, and feel them both.

The history they did not teach you

In the year 725, the English monk Bede wrote a book about time and the calendar, and in it he described the months of the old Anglo-Saxon year. Of the month that fell around April, he wrote the passage above. It is the only early source that mentions Eostre at all. Scholars still debate what it means. Some take Bede at his word, that there was a goddess honored at this season. Others wonder whether he worked backward from the month's name. We cannot know for certain, and I think it is more honest, and more beautiful, to hold her as a question rather than a certainty.

Eosturmonath has a name which is now translated ‘Paschal month’, and which was once called after a goddess of theirs named Eostre, in whose honour feasts were celebrated in that month.

Bede, The Reckoning of Time (De temporum ratione), 725, as commonly given in Faith Wallis's English translation

Centuries later, in 1835, the German folklorist Jacob Grimm suggested that a related goddess, whom he called Ostara, might once have been honored by the German-speaking peoples, because their word for Easter, Ostern, came from the same root. There is no ancient record of Ostara by that name. She is Grimm's careful guess, and she has been loved ever since.

The equinox as one of eight seasonal festivals is younger still. The modern Wheel of the Year came together in British pagan circles in the 1950s and 1960s, and in the 1970s the American writer Aidan Kelly gave several of the festivals the names we use today, Ostara among them. That does not make the celebration less real. It makes it a living tradition, still growing, which is its own kind of spring.

What about the eggs and the hares? Decorated eggs are old and widespread, from the intricate pysanky of Ukraine to the dyed eggs of Easter tables across Europe, and in the Christian calendar eggs were often set aside during Lent and returned with joy at Easter. The Easter hare first appears in German writing in the late 1600s. The popular idea that the hare was Eostre's sacred animal has no ancient source behind it, but the hare is a creature of the spring fields, and it is easy to see why people have wanted to place her there.

And the equinox belongs to more than the Wheel. Nowruz, the Persian New Year, has been celebrated at the spring equinox for thousands of years, and it is still kept with great joy by millions of people today. It is its own tradition with its own meaning, not a version of Ostara, and it reminds us how deeply human it is to greet the returning light.

The sacred return

Some of the oldest stories we have are stories of descent and return, and they belong to this season of balance.

In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Persephone is carried into the underworld by Hades, and her mother Demeter grieves so deeply that nothing on earth will grow. At last a bargain is struck. Because Persephone has eaten a single pomegranate seed in the world below, she must spend part of each year there. But every spring she rises, and when she does, the fields burst into flower and her mother's joy returns to the land.

Far older still, the Sumerian goddess Inanna descends to the underworld to visit the realm of her sister-queen Ereshkigal. At each of seven gates she is stripped of a garment or a jewel of her power, until she arrives with nothing and dies there. She is brought back to life, but the underworld demands someone in her place. In the end, her consort Dumuzi and his sister Geshtinanna share the burden, each spending half the year below and half above, so that the dark and the light are always held between them.

What moves me about these stories is that the one who returns is not unchanged. Persephone comes back as a queen of the underworld as well as a daughter of the spring. Inanna comes back having known her own death. The return is not an escape from the dark. It is a carrying of the dark up into the light, so that both can live in the same body.

That is the sacred return of Ostara. We do not leave winter behind as though it never happened. We bring its wisdom up with us, into the sun, and we let it make our spring deeper.

What Ostara actually asks of us

Ostara asks first that you find your own balance, honestly. Take a sheet of paper and draw a line down the middle. On one side, write what you have been carrying too much of: too much work, too much worry, too much noise. On the other, write what you have had too little of: rest, play, quiet, time outside. You do not need to fix it all at once. Just see it clearly. The equinox reminds us that balance is not a fixed state but a meeting point, something we keep returning to, again and again.

It asks you to plant something. Fill a small pot with soil and press in a few seeds, basil or sunflower or whatever makes you happy, and set it on a sunny windowsill. As you plant, name one intention for the growing season ahead. Then water it and wait. There is real magic in watching a seed you planted with your own hands break the surface. It teaches patience and faith in a way that words cannot.

It asks you to decorate an egg, or several. Dye them with onion skins, beet juice, or turmeric, or simply draw on them with colored pencils. The egg is one of the oldest symbols of new life we have, a whole world held inside a fragile shell. As you work, think about what is getting ready to hatch in your own life. Then share your eggs with people you love, or set them on your table as an offering to the season.

And Ostara asks you to stand in the doorway between light and dark. On the evening of the equinox, step outside at sunset and watch the light go. Feel the day and the night meeting at the edge of the sky. Thank the dark for what it held for you through the winter. Then turn and welcome the light that is coming. You are allowed to love them both.

A final reflection on Ostara

Ostara is a festival of meeting. Light meets dark, winter meets spring, the underworld meets the open field. It does not ask us to choose a side. It asks us to hold both, and to notice that we are stronger, and softer, for doing so. The scale will tip again, as it always does. For now, let it rest level for a breath.

If you are reading this in the Southern Hemisphere, you are standing at the same doorway from the other side. While we celebrate Ostara and the returning light, you are celebrating Mabon, the autumn equinox, where the dark begins to lengthen and the second harvest comes in. We are holding the same balance, facing opposite directions, and I find that a lovely thing.

What I want you to know

I want you to know that whatever you went through this winter, it counts. The grief, the quiet, the long nights when you did not know how you would get through. None of it was wasted. Like Persephone, like Inanna, you are bringing something up from the dark that the light could never have given you on its own.

You do not have to burst into bloom the moment the sun comes back. You are allowed to return slowly, one green shoot at a time. You are allowed to stand in the doorway for as long as you need.

And when you are ready, I hope you will step forward into the light with your whole self, the winter parts and the spring parts together. That is what balance truly looks like. Not perfection, but wholeness.

I will be out in the mud with you, planting my seeds, watching the sunset, loving both the light and the dark.

With love, and with the returning light, Kelli

Continue wandering, Kelli