Today's the Autumn equinox. Some Pagans looked at their calendars and celebrated it yesterday because they didn't know that calendars usually go from Greenwich Mean Time. Unless you are on the Navajo Reservation, Arizona is seven hours from GMT. Arizona doesn't do Daylight Savings Time, so we stay 7 hours different from GMT. Of course the Reservation, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico do change twice a year.

That's why archaeoastronomy.com is so useful, it will give you the exact time and day for your specific location.

According to Mike Nichols, Harvest Home is a quarter day, a Lesser Sabbat and a Low Holiday and represents midautumn. Many modern calendars and almanacs mark this day as the beginning of autumn, but I have to agree with Mr. Nichols. Especially if Samhain is going to be the point where the wheel turns and autumn becomes winter.

In my own path, I call this a solar festival lasting from sunrise to sunrise. There's a small rite that I do involving greeting the sun on those two days. Usually in my calendar I set aside three days for the solar festivals and the High Holidays., the day before for preparation, the day of, and the day after. Which makes today the second day, although this morning was the first day I celebrated a rite for this solar festival.

Like all solar festivals, it's a quarter day and the time each year varies according to movements of the sun. It's a lesson I spent a long time learning.

Now, do you have all that?

Have you taken notes?

Can you do it yourself?

Good. Because most of what I just told you won't necessarily work.

Why? Because the Planet is Not a Clock!

The map is not the territory. The word is not the thing. The symbol is not reality.

We model the solar year on what we have observed happening in the past.

The solar year is only one strand in how we mark the passages of time. The lunar month is another. Then there is the rotational day. These three do not correlate, they interweave. Notice that I made that boldface, it's a pretty important concept.

Besides the solar year, the lunar month, and the rotational day, we have the weather and the climate. For our purposes here, let's call the weather short term and the climate long term. Weather is what is happening now, climate is the trendline over several human generations.

Oops, we just introduced another strand by "accident," the human lifetime.

Then there are patterns of plant life around you. And naturally (pun intended) the patterns of animal life as well. That's eight major strands in our interweaved time, assuming we don't break the plant life and animal life down by species.

Sometimes one strand will influence other strands, but not necessarily.

The pattern out of a book or website isn't going to tell you what's happening now.

That's the difference you should be looking for. The World isn't clockwork, it's differing tensions pulling and pushing against each other. Don't get fixated on the dial or bury your head in the map, take a look at what is happening around you. Don't take another's word for your milieu, that connection is one of the things that makes a Pagan. Guess that is another strand.

That awareness will give you a better idea of what to expect. And when.