Life ebbs, and flows. Happy Easter!

Whatever the roadside grass is that grows in the ditches, it's greening and growing again. Some neighborhood trees have put out catkins. Some maples are flowering. We've not yet seen the year's first dandelion. Thinking about Spring in the North Country reminds us of William Gibson's observation: "The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed." In turn, that makes us think about the saying "Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once." Imagine how frustrating and confusing it might be if Spring wildflowers bloomed at the same time as apples or pears ripened. Our pear tree hasn't even gone through bud burst this year while several years ago it was in full bloom the second week of April. Some years life flows sooner and easier than others.

early flowering? not this year

Photo by J. Harrington

Like seasons and tides, life has ebbs, like Winter, and fullness, like Autumn. Between the two is the Spring's growing and the Summer's swelling. Although Winter in the North Country sometimes creates the impression that life, as we know it, is disappearing, that's not true. If life disappeared, could it, would it return? How could something come from nothing? According to scientists, the earth existed for a long, long time before life came into existence on it. Scientists also wonder if, before the universe came into being with a Big Bang, was there nothing? If there was nothing, did space, and time, exist? If there was nothing and that meant there was no time, how long did the nothing of no time exist?

Can you tell we've had too much time on our hands, sitting around nursing a Spring cold, instead of being outside enjoying the most beautiful days of the year so far? Spring colds are just so unfair that way. Being stuck inside during Winter is much less painful than missing out on the early days of the return of life from its roots and seeds and burrows and dens. We wish each of you a Happy Easter, or Passover, or whatever Spring festival you celebrate according to whichever calendar you follow.

Resurrection

Alison Hawthorne Deming, 1946

My friend a writer and scientist
has retreated to a monastery
where he has submitted himself
out of exhaustion to not knowing.
He’s been thinking about
the incarnation a.k.a. Big Bang
after hearing a monk’s teaching
that crucifixion was not the hard part
for Christ. Incarnation was.
How to squeeze all of that
all-of-that into a body. I woke
that Easter to think of the Yaqui
celebrations taking place in our city
the culminating ritual of the Gloria
when the disruptive spirits
with their clacking daggers and swords
are repelled from the sanctuary
by women and children
throwing cottonwood leaves and confetti
and then my mother rose
in me rose from the anguish
of her hospice bed a woman
who expected to direct all the action
complaining to her nurse
I’ve been here three days
and I’m not dead yet—not ready
at one hundred and two to give up
control even to giving up control.
I helped with the morphine clicker.
Peace peace peace the stilling
at her throat the hazel eye
become a glassy marble. Yet here she is
an Easter irreverent still rising
to dress in loud pastels
and turn me loose
in Connecticut woods to hunt
my basket of marshmallow eggs
jelly beans and chocolate rabbit
there fakeries of nature made vestal
incarnated in their nest of shiny manufactured grass.

for Gary Paul Nabhan 

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