from the Ninth Wave Arts caretakers

The season leans toward balance now, that quiet point in the year when day and night meet as equals. It is the in-between place, neither here nor there, holding both everything and nothing at once. A moment of stillness: sky and earth suspended, light and dark in perfect measure.

Around us, the signs of change gather. The last hummingbirds hover at the feeders, wings a fleeting farewell before turning south. Dragonflies, who all summer darted like jeweled sparks, are fewer now. In their place, bats rise with the dusk, stitching patterns into the deepening sky. Mice quicken in the grass, restless with preparation. Wasps cling to sweetness as their days thin. The first brittle leaves, certain and unhurried, release themselves to the wind.

But beneath our feet, the truest story is told.

Wells are running dry here. At the hardware store, conversations sound like rural check-ins: Do you still have water? How’s your well? Thankfully, water still runs in this place, but every day we wonder. Every turn of the tap carries a pause, a calculation.

How much do we have?

How much can we take?

We watch what we call our spring line, a hidden spring that sends its trickle across the parking lot and down the driveway. It comes from we know not where, but it has always let itself be known: a narrow, shining ribbon of water, steady and sure. Now it has shrunk to a quarter of its usual path, a thin thread slipping through stone and dust. Its retreat speaks as clearly as thunder: the land is waiting, thirsty.

And so, at equinox, we hold this truth: balance is fragile. Abundance and scarcity are never far from one another. To live here is to live with that tension, to walk carefully, gratefully, along the thin line between what is enough and what is not.

This is the season of thresholds, of arrivals and departures, yes, but also of longing. The longing for rain hangs everywhere, like a prayer, breathed not just by us but by the soil, the roots, the hidden veins of water beneath us. Even the trees stand still, listening for it.

So we wait. We wait with the spring’s thin trickle. We wait through the silence that hums before a storm. We breathe in the stillness between what has ended and what has not yet begun.

And in that breath, we wait for the rain.