Easter

Just now, if I stand in the backyard garden at just the right place, I can see the rubied tulips at the foot of the rose-leafed dogwood surmounted by the lavendered explosion of the red bud in the smaller “nook” garden across the yard. Just to the left, the butterfly bush is undergoing its restoration and soon will be attracting those lepidopteran flutterers that carry summer on their wings. I feel like a stranger in this sightscape, the only thing in it in physical decline, the only thing with wintriness about it, the only thing deblossoming. And yet, standing here, rooted to the earth, I somehow feel at home, as if my being here, my witnessing this small-scale epiphany, is somehow right, necessary. An act of communion. I feel as Thoreau did when he stood immersed in one foot of a rainbow: liberated from the densities of matter and gravity, swimming like a porpoise in pure color; an experience removed from instrumentality; an experience unmolested by the necessity of representation; an experience of hint and intimation and innuendo, of pure value, of meaning as meaningfulness; of self, at least for that stilled moment, as a precondition for transcendence.

In that stilled moment, I think I know what “soul” means: our capacity to recognize and acknowledge those rarefied moments when things abracadabra to a different order, take on a luminescence, demand a sustained act of mindfulness; when the drone of the quotidian becomes music; when the block letters of the everyday become calligraphy; when the eye—and through the eye, the mind and heart—is struck and simply must gaze, steadfastly and unblinkingly; when we realize, as did William Carlos Williams with the red wheelbarrow, “so much depends/upon” what we are seeing. The soul is that glistening instant when body and mind, the material and spiritual, distracted from distraction, fuse and transition beyond almostness and in-partness into the uncloistered wholeness of a being being wholly in the world.

And in that stilled moment, I think I know what “Easter” means, that movable feast set some 1700 years ago on the first Sunday subsequent to the full moon subsequent to the vernal equinox, itself a fused moment, of winter and not-winter transitioning to spring; that Christian replacement for the pagan festival of Eostre, Germanic goddess of dawn, itself a fused moment of night and not-night transitioning to day; that capacious holiday, making celebrants of anyone, no matter their faith tradition, that day of basketed sweetnesses and the joyous laughter of children scurrying to discover hidden eggs, themselves emblematic of a fused moment between born and not-born transitioning into aliveness; that day of the hoped-for, the wished-upon, the expectation-imbued; that day of a risen Redeemer or simply the redemptive promise kindled by the rejuvenated earth, once more, once again, gloriously, thankfully, resurrecting itself from the cold-stoned obduracy of winter.