Birdsong of the Equinox: A Personal and Collective Waking Dream

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Guest Post by Riley Carson

This year, on the date of the 2025 Spring Equinox, my wife and I signed up for Hulu, the streaming service now owned by Walt Disney. It seemed like a small, ordinary decision—just another subscription among many. But what followed was surprising.

That same day, I happened to watch two shows with our new subscription whose symbolism struck me with unusual force. Viewed side by side, these two films revealed some startling synchronicities—ones that spoke not only to something deeply personal, but also to the intense polarization we’re witnessing in America and around the world. It felt less like entertainment and more like a waking dream trying to tell me something.

One film was on Hulu, titled The Untold Story of Mary Poppins—A Special Edition of 2020—Disney’s classic story of a magical adorable nanny. The other film is an episode of the 2025 Hulu series titled Paradise, featuring a mysterious underground city and a powerful female character named Sinatra – a clear nod to Frank Sinatra, the emblem of cool detachment, smoky longing, and old-school swagger.

So here, in the private theater of my living room on the equinox, when night and day stood in perfect balance, I chanced upon two cultural archetypes: Mary Poppins and Frank Sinatra. The symbols, the settings, the synchronicity—were too charged, too poetic to ignore.

Archetypes at the Threshold

I begin with the synchronicities that drew my attention to the symbolic link between these two films. In The Untold story of Mary Poppins, we learn that the original author of the Mary Poppins books, a woman named P.L. Travers, was very reluctant to allow Disney film rights. Disney spent twenty years from the early 1940s through early 1960s trying to get her approval. A key turning point was when songwriters for Disney played a song for her that they hoped to have in the film. It was titled “Feed The Birds”. Travers loved it. Though she didn’t yet give in, she started to soften her firm resistance.

In the streaming series Paradise, a key figure is the female leader Sinatra, whose code word is “birdsong”. The bird song in Mary Poppins is about feeding the birds—an act of compassion. In the Paradise film, birdsong is a code word for power and control.

The second synchronicity is the theme of artificial cities: For the Disney film, Disneyland is meant to represent “the happiest place on Earth”, and for the Paradise film, “Paradise” is the name of an entire bunker city built underground to survive a global extinction event—essentially a polar opposite of Disneyland.

Now some observations.

Mary Poppins stands as a symbol of structured magic. She is the divine caregiver: prim, wise, no-nonsense, but loving. She descends from the sky not to entertain, but to heal. She restores order, mends family fractures, and leaves quietly once her work is done. In Jungian terms, she is an aspect of the anima—the archetype of the feminine soul. She represents the sacred dimension of care, restoration, and spiritual grace.

Frank Sinatra, by contrast, occupies the night. He is the romantic outlaw, the wounded masculine, the crooner of broken dreams and stubborn pride. His voice comes not from the clouds, but from the alleyways of longing. He is the archetype Jung calls the shadow, not as an enemy, but as a teacher. Sinatra sings about what hurts because it matters. He reminds us that we must name our ache to be whole.

The spring equinox is a moment of balance – a cosmic pause. Day and night, light and dark, order and chaos meet as equals. Across cultures, it marks renewal. Persephone returns from the underworld. Light overtakes winter. The world begins again.

But the old world never disappears. It waits beneath. In shadow.

Disneyland Above, Paradise Below

Walt Disney created Disneyland. It is a city of dreams – designed, clean, and optimistic. It is a sort of spiritual homeland for Mary Poppins, where everything has its place, and the world can be healed with a song and a spoonful of sugar.

Disney considered the Mary Poppins movie the crown jewel of his many achievements.

In sharp contrast, Paradise is a city of shadows, surveillance, and secrets. And at its center is the character codenamed Sinatra.

Two artificial cities. One above ground, glittering with fantasy. One buried deep, built on fear and consequence.

Some think of Disney’s vision as utopian. But even utopias can become sterile if they reject what Jungian psychology calls the shadow. Conversely, Paradise is a bunker dystopia built by those who refused to confront their own shadow.

Disneyland is what we hope to be. Paradise is what we become when we stop hoping.

The Symbolism of Birdsong

The word “birdsong” echoed through all of this. In the original Mary Poppins film, the song Feed the Birds was Walt Disney’s favorite—a moment of quiet charity, grace, and transcendence. It helped convince P.L. Travers to allow the film to be made.

In the Hulu series Paradise, “birdsong” is a code word embedded in the show’s secretive world. It does not sing; it signals. It is the mechanical echo of a forgotten natural world, repurposed into surveillance.

“Bird” as a Metaphor

In Sinatra’s era, especially in jazz and swing circles, “bird” was sometimes slang for women, or more broadly, a free spirit. Given Sinatra’s many love songs and his image as a romantic and a ladies’ man, there’s a cultural overlap, nothing explicitly with the word birdsong but similar metaphors:

• “Skylark” (written by Hoagy Carmichael, popularized by others more than Sinatra, but in his orbit).
• “Come Fly With Me”—this one soars like a birdsong in tone and image, filled with travel, escape, romance.
• “Fly Me to the Moon”—while not literally about birds, the sense of flight and space gives it a birdsong-like ethereality.

Sinatra’s world is often urban—nightclubs, city lights, whiskey, longing. That’s different from the natural, almost pastoral feel of Mary Poppins’ Feed the Birds. Sinatra’s bird songs are more like a saxophone in a smoky lounge—melodic, aching, and seductive—than a gentle lark in the park.

Again, the symbol splits:

• In Mary’s world, the bird song is compassion.
• In Sinatra’s world, birdsong is power and control.
  But perhaps, together, they suggest something deeper: that our soul’s song has been captured, fragmented, coded. And now it wants to be heard again. We can even see the contrast in the origin of the names Mary and Frank: Mary: The restorer of order through grace. A name etched in sacred memory, tied to birth, care, and spiritual steadiness. Frank: The truth-teller with rough edges. A name that shouts freedom, edge, and the real cost of love and longing.
  

A Message from the Dream

Jung would likely say these contrasting waking dreams are not entertainment, but active imagination. A message from the unconscious, both personal and collective. Sitting in Jung’s counseling office, he might interpret the synchronicity like this for us:“Mary is your inner guide, your higher self. She restores it. Frank is your shadow, your ache, your grit. He reveals. The equinox does not ask you to choose. It asks you to hold the tension until something new is born.“It occurs to me that this waking dream may not be just my own. It may also apply to the American waking dream of a culture at war with itself. In 2025, we are all living through an equinoctial moment.

We are watching two Americas, two worldviews, two human instincts: one to build shining cities of innocence, the other to dig bunkers of survival. Both are incomplete. Both are unsustainable on their own. President Trump, whether we see him as a symbol, a symptom, or a savior, occupies the center of this national psychic rupture. In common terms he is just a man. But in the Jungian language he is the archetype of eruption, of imbalance. A lightning rod for our collective shadow. A signal flare from the unconscious. He is not the cause of our polarization. He does not represent Frank in the Mary-Frank duet. He’s not part of that archetypal duet—but rather, a symptom of what happens when such a duet is missing from the collective psyche.

According to some spiritual teachers, and the reports of many who have survived a Near Death Experience, there is no good versus evil. Souls are here to experience all aspects of living in a physical universe. As Eckhart Tolle writes in his book A New Earth, “In reality, there is no such thing as evil. There is only the ego’s perception, which judges something to be evil or wrong.”

When we disown our own inner shadow, we project it onto an external person. To regain our wholeness, we must recognize the dark side of ourselves, and integrate it to become whole. And so the psyche sends us dreams. Through music. Through stories. Through apparently random movies on TV, perfect alignments on days like the equinox.

We are asked not to choose between the light of day and the dark of night, but to listen. And perhaps, slowly, to remember how to sing, for the juxtaposition is not a conflict—it’s a dialogue. One part of us seeks order, while another seeks honesty. Maybe our collective soul is asking: Can these voices coexist?

And maybe—on those rare days when the sun and moon hold equal power—we are given a mirror: a reflection of our own inner tension and grace, the ache and the magic that makes us who we are.

Toward a New Birdsong

Mary without Frank is hollow. Frank without Mary is lost. Disneyland without Paradise is delusion. Paradise without Disneyland is despair. When these dichotomies become extreme, as they are today in America, the archetypal disruptor emerges from our midst. But in balance, something new may emerge.

The birdsong, the song of the soul, is still here. Soft. Hidden. Waiting for us to listen.

So What Now?

For me personally, these synchronicities remind me to engage my own inner shadow. Each morning I remind myself by saying “Today I will not judge anything or anyone.”

We stand at the global equinox. This year may break us—or begin to mend us. It will depend on whether we listen. Not to slogans. Not to strongmen.
But to the deeper dream beneath all of this: That every society, like every person, must become whole. Not by erasing one side, but by holding the tension until something new is born. A third voice. A new birdsong.

And perhaps it starts with one person sitting between Mary and Frank on a March morning, remembering how to listen.

Please note: Images are for illustration purposes only. Any resemblance to actual persons, either living or dead, is purely coincidental.