The Autumnal Equinox stirs something complicated in me every year. On one hand, there is excitement: the promise of cooler nights, apples ripening, and the feeling that balance is possible, if only for a brief moment. On the other hand, there’s concern our world feels anything but balanced. Storms, violence, and uncertainty keep pressing in. So when the sun pauses at equal day and night, I find myself both hopeful and wary, pulled in two directions at once.
This year, into that tension, a new image has appeared: the Solar Horse. In dreams and meditation, it shows up carrying the disk of the sun, holding it steady. Sometimes it stands alongside Brigid’s other animals. Sometimes it walks through my Interior Grove conversations, my great-grandfather chuckling and calling it the “Divine Pony Express.” The image makes me laugh, but it also makes me listen. The Solar Horse feels like a messenger, a courier between realms, reminding me that balance is not stillness, it is motion carried with care.
For my partner Brian, the connection clicked with the Tibetan wind horse, a bearer of messages and prayers. That image rings true: what is more wish-fulfilling than being heard, whether by God, by ancestors, or by each other? The Equinox becomes a threshold not only of balance but of conversation, between abundance and loss, between past and future, between the living and the dead.
We could chase history here, and there are certainly fragments to find. Sun gods of the Levant sometimes rode between the land of the living and the land of the dead. Horses and disks appear on artifacts. But the truth is, our practices are young. Paganism in its current forms is half a century old at best. Reconstruction is valuable, but the living practice matters most. History offers us metaphors and reminders, but meaning comes when we take symbols into our lives and see if they breathe.
That is what we are doing this year: experimenting. Apples and oats become not only harvest food but offerings to the Solar Horse. A candle flame becomes not just a seasonal decoration but a sign of the sun carried into darkness. Maybe incense rises with our prayers as if handed to the messenger’s reins. All of this feels fitting, and all of it may change. That’s the heart of a living faith.
The important thing is honesty. Too often religion drifts into rote repetition: we do it because we’ve always done it, even if it no longer speaks to us. I don’t want a dead ritual. I want something that moves, that speaks, that evolves. A living tradition breathes; it makes room for mistakes, for laughter, for experiments that don’t quite work. It teaches through the trying.
So this Equinox, I will feed the Solar Horse. Maybe with slices of apple left aside, maybe with oats stirred into a cobbler, maybe simply with joy shared at the table. I’ll light a candle and watch the balance of flame and darkness. I’ll write in my journal, noting whether this practice settles into my bones or not. And I invite you to do the same.
Don’t be afraid to try. Let the Equinox be a time of curiosity. Offer something small and see if it carries a message back to you. Pay attention to your dreams. Laugh when the Divine Pony Express trots through. The world is heavy, but tradition is born not from archaeology alone, it’s born when people risk an experiment in hope.
Balance is not stillness; it is riding the horse as it carries the sun across the line between light and darkness. This year, I choose to ride.
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Chapters:
00:00 Introduction and Recap
02:01 Discussion of Solar Horse Connection
08:56 Spirituality vs Creative Practice
11:23 Traditional Apple Practices and Horse Connections
15:03 Developing Modern Pagan Traditions
18:08 Evolution of Religious Traditions
