Easter Sunday
It was a very discouraging week. I won’t specify the whole litany of problems and setbacks––I realize they pale by comparison to what many others are going through, and I don’t want your sympathy––but by Saturday night my enthusiasm and energy were depleted, and my mood was foul. Some of my worries were personal, some related to the daily assault on democracy and decency we are currently witnessing, but thankfully, I managed to get a night of good sleep.
Sunday dawned, a dazzling Easter morning, and our neighbors would be gathering at the cabaña soon for an annual Easter brunch and an egg hunt for the children. I have been watching these kids grow up and these grown-ups grow old for a very long time. Now I was a benign grandma standing by as the youngsters climbed trees, hunted for treasure-filled eggs, and generally frolicked. A group of strapping adolescent boys carried their fishing poles to the sea, a bevy of bikini-clad beauties, who two minutes ago were little girls, arranged themselves on the sand like sweet rolls, and adults in various configurations talked and laughed and offered up a repast: baked ham, salads, casseroles, desserts, fruit and candies, flowers on the tables. Maybe there was music, mostly there were reminiscences and reflections, updates and anticipations. The hills around us shimmered. As Rilke put it: “Spring has returned. The earth is like a child that knows poems."
It happens every year, this crazy stretch of spring, with its wind and mustard flowers and Kodachrome skies. I don't know why it still takes me by surprise, but there is something astonishing and over-the-top about it. Psychedelic but without the drugs.
And Easter. Well, isn’t it about promise and rebirth? A good time to shed the blues that had snagged me and focus on the wonder and the gratitude, embraced by community.
When I was a churchy child in New York, Easter was my favorite holiday. I can still remember the life and joy of the day and the season, all that sacredness mixed in with pagan spectacle: forsythia in bloom, new shoes and pastel colors, ladies in extravagant hats festooned with birds and bees, a perfumed sanctuary filled with jubilant hymns and stirring sermon, maybe a hollow chocolate bunny awaiting me at home ready to have his head bitten off. I remember a stroll in Prospect Park, my sisters and I in frilly dresses, posing on a stone stairway. There’s a picture of it somewhere.
Mostly I guess I just loved the delirious deliciousness of spring...and it is a sentiment that has never left me. It’s hard to inhabit the gloomy space when the world is dripping with light and so extravagantly in bloom. It’s hard to surrender to despair when children in bunny ears are climbing trees and feisty old friends are waxing poetic and I just glimpsed a red hummingbird hovering above the jasmine outside my window. (A Rufous? It seems like a good omen to me.) Nothing is solved, but we’ll figure it out.
And we’ll fight back, too. Around here, we love democracy, and we love the world, and we care about one another. In the meantime, as Rebecca Solnit said in her most recent newsletter: “All we can do is keep showing up, keep speaking up, keep donating, keep connecting, keep our values close and our courage strong and keep an eye out. And not give up, including not settling into this as though it's normal or permanent or we're helpless.”
It’s Easter Sunday, and the world is my church; I go there daily. I am a fervent upholder of hope, a devout member of the tribe of those who try. And the truth of it is, I don't know exactly what I believe, in a literal and specific way, but it seems to me that life itself is unlikely and miraculous.