Have you ever been outside when it’s cold and then opened the door to a warm house? A torrent of warm, turbulent air rushes out, and another current of cold air moves inside. Our family perhaps yells at us to close the door as we stomp off the snow on our boots. When the door closes, the exchange of hot and cold becomes restricted.
Without this dynamic interplay of warm and cold — a polarity Alan Chadwick creatively describes as “warmth” and “coldth” — there is no unfolding of life. Alchemically, this is the great interplay between fire and water, the great father and the great mother. Virgil writes in his Georgics, “Then almighty father Æther descends in fertilizing showers into the lap of his happy spouse, and mighty himself, mingling with her mighty body nourishes all her offspring.”1 When we reach Virgo (in our present epoch), we arrive at the autumn equinox — here, the exhalation of the parched earth pauses, ready to receive new fertility from the heavens.
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