Tag: ostara

The spring equinox, also known as Ostara, is a special time of year when the day and night are in equal balance. You can use these rituals and writing prompts to celebrate Ostara and inspire your Spring. The energy of this time can help you strengthen your writing practice, develop your creativity, and plant the seeds you will harvest in your writing. Embrace your potential as a writer and get inspired by the light and new growth the earth is offering. 

What is Ostara?

Ostara is the pagan celebration of the spring equinox, the time when there is equal amount of daylight and night. It is the beginning of spring and usually falls around March 21st in the northern hemisphere and September 21st in the southern hemisphere. Astronomically, it can shift a few days from year to year. Ostara is considered the first day of spring and the last day of winter. It is the day that the earth begins to wake after the long winter. 

It’s a time of rebirth and a time of perfect balance. It’s a time to plant seeds and cultivate hope for the future. It’s a celebration of fertility and fecundity and creativity, which makes it an excellent time of year to harness the power of creation and imbue your writing practice with some magic. Things change on Ostara because it’s when the daylight begins to outweigh the darkness. Starting on Ostara, we get more hours of light than we do darkness, and it signifies the time of year when the light has overcome the dark. 

Ostara is the dawn of the Wheel of the Year. Ostara is named for the Germanic goddess of Spring, Eostre, which is also where the word Easter comes from. (Easter, by the way, is celebrated on the Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. Basically, it is the celebration of the first full moon of the Wheel of the Year.) Eostre, in turn, may be derived from the Proto-German Austro, meaning dawn. Though Easter and Ostara do not often correspond in terms of dates, there are many shared correspondences. Both holidays celebrate spring, rebirth, eggs, and hares. 

Ostara Correspondences

One of the most notable Ostara correspondences is the rabbit or the hare. The females of the March hare species can get pregnant with a second litter while they are already pregnant with a first, which is part of why they are a symbol of fertility and fecundity. Eggs are also a symbol of Ostara, and it’s easy to see why, given their connection with spring and new life. 

Ostara is also associated with spring flowers: daffodils, crocuses and pussy willows, all the flowers that are the first to come up in the spring. The colors of these flowers also correspond to Ostara: green, yellow, and purple. Also, pastels are always great for this holiday. The spring equinox is also a time to celebrate the trees coming back to life, so all kinds of seeds and seedlings are appropriate, as are venerating birch trees, alders, and ash trees. Crystals that are particularly relevant for Ostara are rose quartz, moonstone, and aquamarine, which are all associated with growth and new growth. 

Lemony and herbal teas and scents are also good representations of spring and freshness. Floral scents are also good: Rose, lavender, jasmine, and any kind of flower-scented incense or candles will help freshen up your space and make things feel renewed and abundant. 

​​How to Celebrate Ostara as a Writer

Ostara can be an magical time for any artist, and for writers especially. It’s a great time to set new intentions, let yourself be reborn, find more balance, and try something new. If you celebrated Imbolc, maybe you set new intentions and resolutions already. Here are some more ideas for developing your writing practice at this time. 

1. Balance your writing practice. How can you create more balance in your practice? Are you pushing yourself too much in terms of marketing and not spending enough time on your writing? Are you concentrating on plot and not enough on character? Are you focusing on word count and ignoring your playful, creative self? Think about how you can find more balance in your writing practice and endeavor to use this time of balance and new beginnings to reset and begin new practices around your writing process.
2. Start something new. As the buds begin to bloom on the plants, think about where you can also begin new growth. This is an awesome time to start a new project. A new draft, a new book, a new genre, a new job, a new writing ritual. What project have you been waiting to begin? What changes have you been wanting to make? The time is now! 
3. Be playful and childlike. There is a childlike freshness to this time of year, and you can embrace that in your writing practice as well. This is an excellent time to take yourself less seriously, to inject some play into your writing practice. 
4. Let yourself be reborn. You may have ideas about what kind of writer you are, and sometimes these ideas need to shift and change. Are there ideas about your writing or about yourself as an artist that you need to let go of? Maybe you think you are not creative enough, not fast enough, not prolific enough. Now is a time to let yourself be born into the writer you were meant to be. What can you do to begin to embrace your potential and new growth as an artist?
5. Be intentional about the seeds you are planting. Take some time to think about what you want to see grow and blossom in your writing practice. Make a plan to take concrete steps to develop that. Maybe you want to develop a daily habit, be more inspired, read more. This is a great time to plant those seeds so that you can harvest what you have sown later in the year. 
6. Do some planning. It can be invigorating and exciting to make a plan to start something new. This is a great time to use the energy of new beginnings to start planning and goal setting in new ways.
7. Embrace your creativity. Ostara is all about fertility and creativity. It is the perfect time of year to tap into your creative juices and the fruitfulness of your writing practice. Here is a ritual you can do to enhance your writing practice and really open up your imagination. 

Creative Writing Prompts for Ostara

Use these creative writing prompts to support your creativity and writing fertility.

1. What’s new this spring?
2. Write about something just beginning to emerge.
3. Do an erasure in which you delete exactly half of the words in order to make a new poem or story. 
4. Write about an egg that hatches into something unexpected.
5. Write about the world restarting, being reborn completely anew. 
6. Go outside, and let the way the earth is changing inspire you. It’s a great time of year to take your writing outside and look for the small details. They are growing into something beautiful. 
7. Write about the dawn of something new.
8. Write about someone who is green.
9. Write about someone who finds a strangely decorated egg. 
10. Write about overabundance, the problems that can happen when you have too much of a good thing. 
11. There is a folktale about Eostre changing a bird into a hare, which is why the Easter bunny is said to bring eggs. Write about an unbelievable transformation that radically alters the way the character gives birth or brings life into the world. 
12. Write a story that takes place completely at dawn.
13. Write a story about reconnecting with your inner child.
14. Write an aubade, a morning love song about the ways that lovers have to separate as the sun comes up. 
15. Sit with your back against a tree (bonus points for birch, ash, or alder!) and listen. Write the story of the tree. What does it see? How does it experience the world differently? What kinds of stories can it tell?
16. Write about someone emerging from a long period of darkness. 
17. Write about a death that is actually a rebirth.
18. Write a piece inspired by Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits by the Magnetic Fields.
19. Write about finding a frozen creature and nursing it back to health.
20. Write a piece about someone who dies every evening and is reborn every morning. 
21. Write a piece that centers around seeds being planted. 
22. Write a story in which someone brings in a new dawn. 
23. Write about someone who begins completely anew and reinvents themselves from scratch. 
24. Write a story in which someone whose wings are frozen finds a new life because they cannot fly. 
25. Pick one of the greens in the Sherwin Williams color families and create a piece based on the name of the color. 
26. Go outside and write a haiku (or set of haikus) based on the new growth and signs of spring that you find.
27. Spend time with a child and write about the world through their eyes. 
28. Wake up early and observe the dawn. Free-write everything you see, hear, and experience in the first hour of the day.
29. This image by Annie Spratt from Unsplash

30. This image from Ashley Bean from Unsplash

31. This image from Tangerine Newt on Unsplash.

32. This image by Sydney Rae from Unsplash.

33. This image by Chris Jarvis on Unsplash.

34. This image by Jessica Felicio on Unsplash.

For More

If you are looking for more writing prompts, you can find them here. If you want more creativity in your writing routine, check out this post about creating your own writing ritual, or this post for a ready-made creativity ritual.