Bright Days Ahead
Bathed in sunshine. From Eyrarbakki, Southwest Iceland, earlier this week. mbl.is/Árni Sæberg
Today, March 20, marks spring equinox, the day when night and day are about equally long in every corner of the Earth. The word equinox derives from the Latin word aequinoctium, meaning the time of equal days and nights.
In the northern hemisphere, this means that brighter times are ahead, despite the daily news reports of economic slowdown and the rapid spread of COVID-19. The precise time that marked the turnaround was 3:39 am.
Despite the pandemic, the sun continues to rise every morning, and it does so a little earlier every day, keeping our world bright a little longer every evening.
Today, the sun rose in Reykjavík at 7:27 am, and it won’t set until 7:45 tonight. That’s quite a change since only a couple of months ago, January 22, when the sun rose at 10:38 am and set at 4:41 pm. At the time, it was hard to imagine days filled with light.
Therefore, we know from experience that two months make a great deal of difference in terms of light. We must remain convinced that a couple of months from now, when we enjoy 24 hours of daylight, the darkness brought about by recent events will have been replaced by brighter times in every sense of the word.
