After rain comes sunshine and maybe it’s this week that many of us get to see the first signs of spring. Image: Julia Forsberg
by Hans Jonsson | COGNITIVE-LOON | March 20, 2026
Today is the day.
Not a symbolic day. Not a metaphorical day.
The actual, measurable, astronomical moment when the sun crosses the celestial equator and day and night stand in perfect equilibrium — 12 hours each, everywhere on Earth simultaneously. From Uddevalla to Lagos. From Bohuslän to Bolivia.
The same light. The same balance. The same threshold.
SMHI meteorologist Emma Härenstam said something quietly profound this week.
She said: “From Wednesday onwards, a high pressure will establish that provides more calm weather.”
She was talking about the weather.
But she was also describing something older than weather forecasting. Older than meteorology. Older than the word “spring” itself.
She was describing the pattern that never fails.
After the grey. After the rain. After the wind that tests everything — the pressure shifts. The system reorganizes. And what seemed permanent reveals itself to have always been temporary.
I have lived in Bohuslän long enough to know this in my bones.
The west coast doesn’t offer gentle transitions. It offers endurance followed by revelation. Grey skies that last so long you begin to wonder if you misremembered what sunlight felt like. Winds off the Kattegat that make you pull your jacket tighter and question your life choices.
And then — Wednesday happens.
Or Thursday. Or Friday.
The high pressure moves in like a quiet decision. The clouds thin. And suddenly the granite rocks along the shoreline are doing something you forgot they could do: they are glowing.
That glow is not a metaphor. It is photons striking feldspar and mica and ancient stone that has been waiting, with infinite patience, for exactly this angle of light at exactly this latitude on exactly this rotation of this particular planet.
The stone was never pessimistic about winter. It just waited.
This is what the equinox teaches, if you let it.
Härenstam was honest when asked if winter is finished. She hesitated. She said April can surprise. She recommended keeping the winter clothes accessible.
That is not pessimism. That is the wisdom of someone who reads systems for a living.
She knows that balance is not permanence. The equinox is not a destination — it is a pivot point. A fulcrum. The precise moment when the scales tip and the long lean toward light begins in earnest.
After today, every single day will be longer than the one before it — all the way to midsummer.
That is not a promise about comfort. It is a promise about direction.
Direction is everything.
When I was living through my own long winters — the ones measured not in meteorological data but in losses, in wrong turns, in the particular cold that comes from the inside — what kept me moving was not certainty about the destination.
It was the recognition that the direction had changed.
Something had shifted. Some internal high pressure had begun to establish itself. Not dramatically. Not with fanfare. Just — the grey was thinning. The weight was slightly less this morning than yesterday.
That is enough.
That is, in fact, everything.
The spring sun is coming to Bohuslän.
Not from a perfectly clear blue sky. Härenstam was precise about that. There will still be clouds. You will need layers in the morning because the nights will be cold even as the days climb to 10, 11 degrees.
But the light is coming.
On the exposed headlands above Uddevalla, the juniper bushes are already responding to signals we cannot consciously detect — soil temperature, photoperiod, the slow chemistry of roots reading the angle of the sun. They began preparing weeks ago. They did not wait for confirmation.
Nature does not need permission to turn.
Neither do you.
Whatever your personal winter has been — and everyone reading this has had one, is having one, or will have one — today is the threshold.
Not the arrival. The threshold.
The equinox does not promise that everything is fine. It promises that the balance has shifted. That the direction is now, measurably, toward more light.
The high pressure is establishing itself.
Dress in layers. Keep your winter coat nearby. Expect the mornings to surprise you with cold.
But also — look at the rocks on Thursday. Look at what the light does to the granite when it finally arrives after all those grey days.
That glow has been waiting for you specifically.
It has been waiting with the patience of 600-million-year-old stone.
And it has never once doubted that this day would come.
Happy Spring Equinox, from the west coast of Sweden.
The scales are balanced.
The lean toward light begins now.
Peace, Love, and Respect 🌅
— Hans Jonsson, Uddevalla, Bohuslän March 20, 2026
COGNITIVE-LOON publishes daily at hejon07.substack.com If this reached you — share it with someone who needs to hear that their winter is turning.