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S2E10 TRANSCRIPT:

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Mark: Welcome back to The Wonder: Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host, Mark.

Yucca: And I'm Yucca.

Mark: And today we are talking about celebrating the Spring Equinox, which is the point at which on the equator, the sun and, or I'm sorry, the day and the night are of equal length. It's the midway point in the lightness darkness cycle that goes through the, the world every year.

Yucca: It's the point at which the Earth passes through the ecliptic, the Sun's equator. So the plane that reaches out through the Solar System, that's like the table that the planets are orbiting on and we aren't perfectly aligned with that.

We're at a little bit of an angle. And so we pass through that twice a year and that's the, that's what the equinoxes are for us.

Mark: Right, right. But before we talk about that we thought that because we're on the year anniversary now of when the shutdowns began, that we would say a little bit about the pandemic.

Yucca: Yep. And we know that a lot of people are pretty tired of talking about it because it's, well, a lot of us wish that it would just be done already. It's been a whole year. But it touches all of our lives everywhere. And a lot of people, a lot of our listeners have lost, loved ones this year.

Mark: Yes, we were. We were talking before we began to record. And one of the things that I noted is that there are about 540,000 minutes in a year. And what that means because the United States is rapidly closing on that total of deaths from COVID that roughly one person per minute died in the United States of COVID-19 for a year it's incomprehensible it's beyond our ability to get our minds around just how much loss that is, how much sorrow, how much grief and.

If you're one of the folks that lost someone, we're very sorry. It's really been a terrible tragedy. One of the worst things ever to be fall this country and the world, of course, I mean millions and millions of people.

Yucca: And that number is just the death numbers. That's not all of the other impacts that has had.

Mark: Of course and that those impacts are not even only health impacts. They're people losing their houses because they lost their jobs. They're you know, people being cast into poverty or not being able to pay for healthcare or, you know, all the various other maladies that can happen to people when money is pulled out of the equation.

The economy naturally they took a terrible dive. And we suffered hard in 2020. It was really a difficult year, but that said things appear to be turning the corner. Now we have a vaccine. There is, there are massive programs to implement that vaccine across the world. And we can start imagining a time when we can get together in person with our loved ones and hug them and have the kind of social interaction that we had before.

And in the United States, it's we have just passed a very large economic stimulus package, which is not only about getting shots into people's arms so that they're protected, but also about rekindling the economy after the collapse of last year. And there is cautious optimism that this is going to lead to some very good things, especially for the most vulnerable people in American culture.

So we're here in the U S we're pretty excited about that.

Yucca: Yeah, I'm feeling pretty optimistic myself. It feels very appropriate for the beginning of spring. Really. It's a very different sense to what it felt like a year ago. Looking forward. At 2020 with the uncertainty and dread. Yeah. Going, what is what's going on our whole world, knowing that our whole world was changing, but not knowing what was coming.

And now, like you said, we've been through a hell of a year, but it looks like there's a lot of work before us. But that it feels much more hopeful. Right? Much more hopeful.

And feel ready to get out there, ready to get back out into the metaph