Spring Equinox, 2016

I always feel a bit odd when the four major astronomical seasons fall on dates other than 21sts or 22nds. I know that’s not logical, merely misplaced emotion based on cultural ethnocentrism, but, it’s still there. Today, March 20, 2016, is apparently one of those cusps, probably because this is a leap year.

Still, it makes me oddly uncomfortable, as though I were wearing someone else’s clothing or sleeping in a strange bed. Forging odd links.

Vermillion, I like the word and the color as well although, like equinoxes and solstices on the 20th they don’t seem to fit. Cinnabar, its source mineral definitely sounds yellowish to me, but tending towards sand, or as if tasted, well, … like cinnamon (a huge mistake as living with mercury its ingestion tends towards the fatal). To me vermillion sounds yellowish or greenish, perhaps because in Spanish, the word for green is verde. Which, on this strange day, takes us to Verdi and operas.

In India cinnabar is called sindoor, a cool sounding name. There it is a symbol of fertility and applied as a dot by grooms on the forehead of their brides to symbolize their union. Hmmm, a poisonous symbol of fertility, a lot of material for operas there.

The day is over but it may be a very long while until we learn its significance amidst the flotsam in the streams of time.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2016; all rights reserved