I remember pressing seeds into little cups of earth held by an empty egg carton. Gently covering them with a blanket of dirt. Placing the container carefully by the window after a sprinkling of water. And then waiting. And waiting. And waiting — interspersed with water and light and time.
Do you remember the moment that very first green shoot peeked its head out? How exciting it was to watch the growth happening day after day on the windowsill?
But only after the darkness. The quiet hope. The waiting — patient or not.
Last night was the new moon in Pisces — the last new moon of the astrological year. A seed planted in the dark. Tomorrow is the equinox — light and dark in perfect balance. And I’m writing to you from right here, in the middle. In the egg carton by the window.
I think a lot of us are here. Something is shifting — you can feel it even if you can’t name it. The old way doesn’t hold anymore, but the new one hasn’t quite arrived. You’re not going back. And the new shoot hasn’t broken through yet. But something is stirring under the soil.
I want to tell you what’s been stirring in mine.
A root statement came through. Not one I crafted. One that arrived, the way things arrive when you’ve been filling the well long enough that the water starts to rise on its own.
Divinity embodied in the midst of me just as I am. Not out of this world but deeply embedded in it. Coherence. Gift. Gritty grace. Gratitude.
I wrote it in a journal with a dolphin on the cover, in the early morning, in the days before the equinox. And when I read it back, I recognized it the way you recognize your own face in a photograph you didn’t know someone was taking. Oh. That’s what I’ve been trying to say. For years. Maybe for my whole life.
Not a God who rescues us out of the mess. A God who shows up *as* the mess — as the gritty, grounded, ordinary, hard, beautiful, broken-open reality of being alive. Not transcendence. Incarnation. Love taking a body. Love taking *this* body. Yours too.
A few weeks ago, I heard about a water researcher named Veda Austin who has been studying what happens when you bless water — when you hold intention and presence over it. One coherent structure, she found, can influence the twelve around it. Not by force. Not by fixing anything. Just by being coherent. Just by being what it is.
I heard about this from two completely unrelated directions on the same day, which is usually how the universe lets me know it’s not messing around.
And something clicked — or maybe cracked open.
I’d written to a dear friend years ago, before any of this teaching had a name: “At every stage we are inside an eggshell. When cracks appear, it can be terrifying as the whole sky of our worldview is coming apart. And yet, that crack is itself a gift of Love and Grace, opening us to a larger container.”
And then Mary Magdalene walked in — the way she does — with her red egg of resurrection. Not the disciples who fled. The woman who stayed, who stood in the pain, who held space through the worst of it and then carried the impossible news of new life. Her response wasn’t shame or guilt. It was unshakeable joy.
The cracked egg. The red egg. The coherent egg. I sat with all three and realized they were the same egg. And that the work I’ve been building — the circles of deepening that hold the teaching I offer — they *are* the egg. We begin at the outer shell: remembering, mining our own stories, listening to what our lives have been trying to tell us. The cracking is the middle: the descent, the turning toward what we’d rather flee. And at the center — the light that was always there. Not something we earn. Something we uncover by letting the shell break.
And here’s the thing that undid me: the coherence doesn’t wait for the cracking to begin its work. It’s already radiating through every layer. You don’t have to be ready. You don’t have to be fixed. You just have to be in the field.
This is what the equinox teaches: light and dark are not enemies. They are not even opposites. They live on a continuum — the ancient Aramaic worldview already knew this — and the problems come when we try to exile one or the other. When we outsource our light. When we deny our shadow. When we insist on one without the other.
The equinox doesn’t choose. It holds both. Equal. At the same time. Not as compromise but as wholeness. Tomorrow, the sky will do what I’ve been trying to learn with my whole life.
Because I know something about the light being there first. I was three years old, dancing around the living room with the music loud and nobody watching. Freeform and full of joy and expression. Before anyone told me to tone it down. Before the mirroring began — that long season of learning to read the room instead of trusting what was already alive in me. Before the forgetting.
The radiance was first. It was always first. We just discover it last — after the long way around, after the breaking, after the descent. And when we find it again, we recognize it.
Oh. You were here the whole time
I think you might know what I mean.
Here in Estes Park, the March light has been extraordinary. That quality of light in the mountains where everything feels both sharp and tender at once — the snow still holding on in the shadows, the meadows just beginning to think about green. The whole world tipping toward spring. The equinox one sleep away.
I’ve been telling you, in different ways across these posts, that something is being born. In the hallway with the paper bridges. On the volcanic ground in Hawaii. In the silence before the teaching begins.
I believe this with everything I have: the old world is falling away. And what is rising in its place is not a program or a platform or a fix. It is coherence. It is people remembering who they really are — one at a time, and then the twelve around them beginning to remember too. Not by force. Not by fixing. By presencing.
By being the one egg.
Tomorrow the equinox says: you don’t have to choose between the light and the dark. You get to be the place where they meet.
Your seed is already in the soil. The darkness has been doing its work. And the shoot — I promise you — is closer than you think.
I’d love to know — where is the seed stirring in you? What’s in the dark, waiting? What shoot are you watching for? Leave a comment, or send me an email — I read every one.
Elizabeth Jameson is an ordained Episcopal priest, writer, retreat leader, and soul companion. For those who feel drawn to explore existential and spiritual questions more deeply, Jameson offers opportunities—both in Estes Park and online—to delve into them through shared reflection and practice. These are not programs so much as paths of attention and discernment, for those who find resonance. Jameson can be reached through her website, Broken Open, or her Substack site.
Next week a small group begins a spring journey together in Inner Alchemy of Wisdom. Soul’s Compass continues April 6. And a new seed is sprouting — The Remembering Way, a podcast coming this spring. I shared a bit about what’s growing here.
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