I was walking with my ducks at the crack of dawn yesterday morning, typing notes into my phone with one thumb while they waddled ahead in their chaotic little parade. This is my spacious time, when the world is still soft around the edges and my thoughts can tumble out without bumping into anybody else’s urgency.

The ducks stopped at their favourite watering hole, the creek we’ve widened and added a dam to, so it fills up with the rain. They were doing that thing where they all try to crowd into the same tiny section, even though we’ve literally engineered them a proper swimming pool. Fighting over six inches of creek while ignoring the whole expanded basin. I laughed, then immediately realized I’d just watched a perfect metaphor for what we’re all about to do this week.

Then I looked at the actual date. Equinox tomorrow. Eclipse Tuesday. Of course.

Balance points make us suspicious. Like when you’re walking on a narrow ledge and someone tells you not to look down, so naturally that’s exactly what you do. We’re told the equinox is about perfect balance, go day and night in harmony, light and dark holding hands, everything in its proper proportion. But balance is actually the moment right before everything tips.

I was thinking about this as I watched my ducks reorganize themselves into their morning formation. They kept repositioning, each trying to find the spot where they could see what they needed to see without blocking anyone else. Eventually, one of them realized the solution wasn’t better organization but wandering off to find her own bugs. The answer to impossible equilibrium is to stop trying to achieve it.

Which might be why this week feels less like standing at a balance point and more like being at the exact centre of a seesaw when someone suddenly jumps off the other end.

THE WEEK’S ENERGY

There’s a distinct quality to eclipse season that few people talk about. It’s not the darkness itself that unsettles us as much as the wrongness of the light. When something that’s supposed to be constant suddenly isn’t, our whole system goes on alert. Even if we know it’s temporary. And even if we understand the mechanics. The primitive part of our brain still says, something fundamental has shifted.

And speaking of fundamental shifts, the UN is gathering for Beijing+30, which marks three decades since that watershed moment for women’s rights, at the exact moment when those rights feel more precarious than they have in years. Thirty years of declaring equality while the machinery of inequality just gets more… sophisticated. It’s like celebrating the anniversary of deciding to clean your house while you’re standing in the same mess, just rearranged.

There’s a cosmic joke here, I think. We’re having all these global meetings about balance and equality while the weather itself has decided to stop performing its expected role. Scientists are calling it “The Great Hurricane Drought of 2025”. No new storms since August 28th during what should be peak season. The conditions are all there for chaos, but instead… nothing. Calm where there should be storms. It’s like the universe looked at our careful preparations for disaster and decided to be chaotic about being peaceful instead. Hmmm…

Meanwhile, an asteroid skimmed past Earth on September 18th, and it came just over twice as far away as the Moon, which is close enough to remind us that while we’re down here arguing about who gets what piece of the pie, there are rocks the size of city blocks casually cruising through our neighbourhood. The cosmos has its own agenda, and it doesn’t care about our committees.

Here on the west coast, we’re watching the autumn rains gather themselves while the rest of the continent holds its breath for storms that won’t come. It feels like we’re in the one place where the weather is doing what it’s supposed to, while everywhere else experiences the opposite. We’re the balance point that proves the rule of imbalance.

WHAT IT MIGHT FEEL LIKE

You might wake up this morning (equinox day, Monday) with the distinct feeling that gravity has changed its mind about something. Not dramatically, but enough that your coffee mug feels different in your hand and you can’t quite nail the timing of your usual morning routine.

There’s likely to be at least one conversation this week where someone asks you a perfectly reasonable question and you open your mouth to give your standard answer, only to realize you don’t believe it anymore. Not that it was ever a lie, but somewhere between last week and this week, it stopped being true. Like how you can wear the same jacket for years until one day it suddenly doesn’t fit, even though nothing measurably changed.

You might find yourself unusually sensitive to asymmetry. I mean, crooked picture frames will drive you crazy, and uneven conversations will feel unbearable, any situation where you’re giving more than you’re getting (or vice versa) will feel like wearing shoes on the wrong feet.

The eclipse on Tuesday might manifest as sudden clarity about relationships that have been operating on expired contracts. You know the ones. It’s where you’re both still showing up out of habit and following agreements you made when you were different people. The eclipse doesn’t end these connections, but it does hand you the scissors and points meaningfully at the threads.

Some of you will experience that dizzy feeling when you’re perfectly balanced, but somehow that’s more destabilizing than being off-centre. It’s like when you finally achieve the thing you’ve been working toward and suddenly don’t know what to do with yourself. The arrival can be more disorienting than the journey.

THE SOUL PERSPECTIVE

From the soul’s point of view, this week is hilarious in its precision. Here we are, celebrating 30 years of declaring women equal while simultaneously watching systems scramble to maintain inequality with increasing desperation. The soul sees the comedy in this. How we create elaborate ceremonies to celebrate progress while actively resisting it.

The equinox-eclipse combo is the soul’s way of saying, “You want balance? Fine. Here’s perfect balance. Notice how uncomfortable it makes you? That’s because you’re not meant to be balanced. You’re meant to be in motion.”

The thing about equality, equilibrium, and all our careful attempts at fairness is they’re not destinations as much as momentary alignments in an ongoing dance. The soul knows that true justice isn’t everyone having exactly the same thing. It’s everyone having what they need to become who they’re meant to be.

The soul watches our humanness trying to negotiate peace while selling weapons, trying to stop climate change while drilling for more oil, trying to create equality while maintaining hierarchies, and it doesn’t judge. It just observes, with something like compassion, how we keep trying to have it both ways. Like my ducks at their engineered swimming hole, we create elaborate solutions and then ignore them to fight over the smallest spaces.

What the soul sees is that every attempt to force balance through control creates an equal and opposite imbalance elsewhere. It’s like trying to level a waterbed. Push down here, it pops up there. The only way to achieve actual equilibrium is to stop pushing altogether.

HOW TO BE WITH IT

First, stop trying to balance everything. I know the equinox makes you feel like you should be achieving some kind of cosmic equilibrium in all areas of your life simultaneously, but that’s like trying to organize water. Some things are meant to be uneven. And some scales are meant to tip. 

When you feel the eclipse shadow crossing over something you thought was permanent, resist the urge to immediately flood it with artificial light. Often, things need to be obscured to be really seen. It’s like how you can’t see stars until it gets dark enough. Some truths only become visible in the absence of what usually illuminates them.

Practice selective equilibrium. Choose maybe two things that actually need balancing and let everything else wobble however it wants. Your chequebook and your chakras don’t both need to be aligned on the same day. Pick your battles with the universe.

When someone tries to sell you their version of balance (and they will, especially this week), ask them who benefits from that particular configuration. Balance according to whom? Equality measured how? Fair by whose standards? The answers are usually illuminating in ways the questions aren’t meant to be.

YOUR WEEK IN ONE SENTENCE

“This week, I let the scales tip wherever they want to tip, and I surf the tilt.”

MINI PRACTICE FOR DANCING WITH DISEQUILIBRIUM

At exactly 12:00 noon each day this week (peak balance point of the daily cycle), stand on one foot for thirty seconds. Notice how balance isn’t stillness but constant micro-movements, tiny adjustments, a thousand small fallings and recoveries.

Then stand on both feet and notice how that feels less stable somehow, how equal distribution of weight can actually make you feel less grounded than intentional imbalance.

Write down one thing in your life that you’ve been trying to keep in perfect balance. Then write: “What if I let it tip?” Don’t answer the question. Just let it exist.

If you’re feeling particularly brave, actually let something tip this week. Start small, maybe let the dishes pile up while you read a whole book, or cancel a perfectly reasonable obligation for a perfectly unreasonable adventure. Notice how the world doesn’t end. And notice how sometimes imbalance is just another word for priority.

ANYWAY…

The thing about the equinox is that it only lasts a moment. The rest of the time, we’re tilted toward light or dark, summer or winter, hope or despair. The tilt is what creates seasons. The tilt is also what makes things grow.

This week, we stand at the balance point just long enough to remember that balance itself is an illusion, but a brief pause in the eternal dance of too much and not enough. It’s a momentary truce between opposing forces that prefer to be in tension.

Let them dance, and let yourself tilt. Then, let the eclipse shadow whatever needs shadowing. 

Jonni

PS Is anyone else noticing that the equinox light hits different when you’re writing by creek-light at dawn? Like the balance between day and night means something else entirely when you’re already awake in the in-between spaces, watching ducks ignore your engineering efforts in favour of chaos? Just asking…