Tomorrow is Easter. I'm not a religious person and so I don't celebrate in any traditional way. But as with so many of our holidays, there are deeper things at work here.
For example this year, Easter comes on the heels of April Fool's Day. What a concept?!!! A special day for practical jokes and hilarity. And as any regular reader of DK knows, a group of wise, funny, and talented people here found a way to help us all celebrate the hilarity in style. Laughter is INDEED the best medicine, especially for folks like me who are too often plagued with earnestness.
Then, of course, this holiday coincides with the coming of Spring. Living in the "tundra," there are times that isn't as obvious on Easter as it is this year. Even way up here in teh Nort, the birds are singing and the trees are budding. Just this week, I spent a few glorious moments outside watching baby bees hovering by the dozens around the buds on a sapling of a tree. It reminded me of this:
When Jewel Akens sings about this:
When I look into your big brown eyes
Its so very plain to see
That its time you learned about the facts of life
Starting from A to Z.
I don't think he was talking about a pedagogical lesson (how did he get away with that back in 1965?) So I suspect that its not just the bees who are spending time tasting the sweet nectar these days. I think that's pretty healthy too.
But perhaps the part of this season that goes deepest for me is that its a time of renewal. That almost always sends me to one of my favorite things ever written on the internet, by Nezua.
We are always new. Every moment is new. No moment need be like anything that came before, even when the resemblance is striking and our imagination lacking. And yet, of course we must learn from who we once were. But to let a lesson that once helped inform every step forward is to walk an old path, and to preclude the sight of new horizons from our view...
Because life is not like a series of books in a course on ...anything. It fluctuates. We fluctuate. We are not a being, but a becoming, as Friedrich once said. And sometimes ideas are hammered out and we draw lines and walls and are told we fall on one side or the other and so do our thoughts and so does all that follows from them...and so it goes. We buy into these illusory borders...
Being sure is but the borderwall we place around a heart to ward off the skinstripping wind of the next living moment.
So during this season of renewal, I want to take some time to listen to the questions that come with "the skinstripping wind of the next living moment."
Sometimes
By David Whyte
Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest
breathing
like the ones
in the old stories
who could cross
a shimmering bed of dry leaves
without a sound.
you come
to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests
conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.
Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,
questions
that have patiently
waited for you,
questions
that have no right
to go away.