equinoxes my idea to promote equinoxes as Earth Action Days has resided here for a while…
… but on 21st September 2026, after preparation with a steering team this personal project entered a new phase with the launch of a new particpatory website (click image)…
…and these blog pages have a new purpose: to offer perspectives on what equinoxes offer, and represent a back story of EQ. And if you have landed here first, these are the unique attributes of equinoxes which form the bedrock of the project:
1) Equinoxes are true planet events
Fixed moments of balance every spring and autumn in Earth’s orbit around the sun
2) We are equal under the sun at equinox
Equal day and night – 12 hours – wherever you are on the planet
3) Two equinoxes double up our annual commitments to act
Pledge twice a year to spring into action and turn over a new leaf at equinox
So many of our problems cross boundaries, continents and oceans – above all, the climate-nature crisis. At a planetary level, so much more unites us than divides. Equinoxes are ideal moments to rebalance and reconnect, to energise our instincts to innovate, adapt, and preserve.
Twinned equinoxes can help us accelerate towards a sustainable post-carbon future.
EQ has had a logo ‘makeover’. It retains the geometry of Phi, the golden section proportion that carries so much information and philosophy central to EQ, but also incorporates the tilt of Earth’s polar axis – 23.5°
In 1969, the March equinox was nearly chosen as the first Earth Day. Today, using both equinoxes as twin planetary events is a bold new idea. This EQ Index gathers unique selling points (USPs) and prime attributes to explore. Choose a theme from this pasteboard and dive into the list below. Continue reading
Our climate and biosphere are now universally recognised to be in crisis, as this graph* of the past 175 years of climate data by Ed Hawkins, creator of the celebrated ‘climate stripes’ starkly shows. We have all just experienced the exponential realities of pandemic infection. Humanity’s influence is causal in both instances – again, beyond reasonable doubt.
26-10-19, 09.17 UTC (Earthtime). Many humanoids will “fall back”* to a logically correct time tonight, when they set their clocks to approximate to the solar noon of their slice of planet Earth’s surface. This is wise, for they have been getting up increasingly in the dark, especially if they inhabit the western regions of those slices. Continue reading
EQ doubles up Earth Day by coupling spring and autumn equinoxes and making twinned Earth Days each year. But equinoxes, being actual Earth Days rather than arbitrary calendar events, are also excellent prompts for clear, rational and logical thinking. Hence a post about Straight and Crooked Thinking, published in 1930. Continue reading
This is a memoir from 2017; an excursion into time, space and music… but now (October 2026) I find myself once more on stage at the Royal Opera in a new production of Parsifal, so it’s been bumped up the ranks!
Stephen Hawking is 75! Indomitable doesn’t come close to describing his life. He became a research fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge shortly before I joined as an undergraduate in 1967.
My father painted two portraits at King’s College Cambridge: EM Forster and AC Pigou. He enjoyed the company of both men during sittings, and took me to meet Forster when I was a teenager. He walked me across the grass court from his rooms to the famous chapel opposite. Continue reading
Capture the universal synchronised sunrise and sunset this equinox
Ready to be part of something truly illuminating? Here’s how and why…
Equinoxes are the magic moments in March and September when all life on Earth is in balance.
EQ says at equinox, with 12 hours of day, 12 of night everywhere on the planet we are equal-under-the-sun. Simply by joining shutterbugs around the world you can prove it! Continue reading
This NASA image from space shows Earth at the moment of equinox. The Equator is exactly parallel to the Ecliptic, the plane of Earth’s orbit around the sun, so the noonday sun is vertically above the (shadowless) observer at the Equator.
Originally written for Earth Day 2024, this blog explains how equinoxes “sit above and beyond” the babel of designated days of…’. And the best explainer now is EQ’s promo movie. The story of its gestation can be followed with links to two earlier blogs. Continue reading
Six ads prepared for EQ by Jonny Biggins. Click here for the next instalment
The solar calendar marks the annual cycle as a ‘wheel of the year’, observing the solstices and equinoxes and also the ‘cross-quarter days’ between, creating eight ‘supermonths’. This is a revision of a blog originally written on 6th November 2024 – the morning of Trump’s reelection – to delve further into these fixed calendar events and articulate EQ’s philosophical basis. 6th November is the exact midpoint between equinox and solstice. Continue reading