✺ Ostara, Eggs, and the Hare: When Spring Becomes a Threshold ✺

Ostara is the Wiccan sabbat of the Spring Equinox,  the moment when the Northern Hemisphere turns toward spring, the earth awakens, and the light begins to win its way back.

Around this equinox, many holy days gather in the same season of renewal: Passover, Easter, and Nowruz; different languages, different lineages, and yet a shared pulse of return.

Ostara carries its own mythic imagery. It is named for a Germanic spring goddess,  sometimes spelled Astara, Eastra, or even linked to the word Easter, and described as a young woman crowned with flowers, bearing a basket of eggs. At her side: a rabbit or hare. Sometimes the hare appears as a sweet bunny; other times it is portrayed as a more untamed, upright, human-sized creature. Either way, the symbol is unmistakable: fertility, vitality, and the insistence of life.

This is why eggs and the hare feel so charged at this time of year.

The egg is a sealed promise:life held in darkness, waiting to open.

The hare is motion and instinct: a creature of the field, alert and alive, leaping toward

the season ahead. Together they speak a simple truth: spring is not only soft. It is powerful.

And many spring customs we associate with Easter, like decorating eggs, hunting for them, also appear as part of Ostara festivities. The season keeps repeating its message through different doors: new beginnings are real, and they ask to be honored.

Ostara is often considered an ideal time to ask for blessings of enhanced fertility and new beginnings. Not only in the literal sense, but in the creative sense too. What do you want to grow? What do you want to bring to life? What needs your attention, your devotion, your patience?

There’s also a quiet, beautiful practice described in Ostara traditions: the belief that rain falling on Ostara carries special potency. You can receive it simply by standing in it,  letting the season touch your skin, or collecting it and preserving it as “Ostara water,” used for spiritual cleansing and renewal. Sprinkled over a person, added to a bath, used to cleanse sacred tools , the gesture is the same: to clear what is stagnant, and make room for what is coming.

You don’t need to perform spring. You don’t need to do it “right.” You only need to meet it.

If you want a simple way to honor this threshold:

• Place one egg (real or symbolic) somewhere you’ll see it. Let it represent what is ready to be born.
• Write one sentence about what you want to begin -  not a list, not a plan. A direction.
• If there is rain, stand in it for a moment. Let it be a quiet blessing. If not, take a bath or wash your hands slowly, with the same intention: renewal.

Ostara reminds us that rebirth is not an idea. It is a season. It is a practice. It is the earth’s own language for beginning again.

May you enter it with clarity.
May you begin with devotion.
May what has been sleeping in you awaken gently, and for real.

✺