Easter
The day spread itself in sunflower tones, in the jangly guitar chords of The Sundays, in the warbled buzzer of blackbirds resting in open-mouthed heat on still yellow-budded limbs. On cracked concrete steps, they sat with guitars and banjos while cats wriggled like epileptic serpents on the bright, white stone. Here and there, bikinis lowered and flirted with sunlight, strollers caterpillar-tapped plastic wheels, the barista raised her face and tilted back her chin and smiled squint-eyed and freckled.
There are grebes in the surfway bobbing in the jet ski wake, and bumble-bees testing the old fire station’s stucco with pipe-cleaner legs. My root spreads, that naked blue wolf rattles, and my dreams are of tornados and gorillas. She sails by me in a wooden kayak as a robin calls happily from the rock crevice as is answered, met and mated.
It is hard to find anything wrong with the world at this moment, hard to listen to internal voices or heed fears, hard to be anything but present and complete. Today is Easter and this is my church, my connection to reverence spelled out among the mud worms, the pews are blackberry bushes swollen and ripe, the altar is a lemon dandelion circle, communion is bare feet on a soft-grass meadow. The ghost mountain is painted on a translucent layer of cloud canvass, like some Melville-era bearded divinity. Resurrection is the whale-barnacled moon breaching, the golden trout sun spawning, and the old elephant bark mother tree curling around squirrel tails. And it happens not only every day, but every minute.
I am struck finally by the truth of the wholeness of all things, all stimulus the same, all expression the same. Distinction, like borders is imaginary. One inhalation. One exhalation. Only up-close are the dots various colors and only to the up-close eye does that matter.
This earth, this wind, this water is what we are made of and to this we will return. It used to be what we encountered daily, what we contended with, what we had to understand and be understood by, how we lived. Our bodies, our pulse rates, our blood pressure, our stress levels are reduced, slowed, brought into balance by a return to connection, whether by gardening, sunbathing, boating, or allowing for the guilty pleasure of goofing off by water or by wood. But we often need the excuse, the object, the activity to make it right, to make it seemingly worth the time spent. Or if we cannot make the journey, we find the easement, the silence in mediation or yoga, or art or writing, or sex.
What more for us defines any broad sense of divinity and source than this? What other explanation for those moments of carefree, shoes-off, breeze in the hair, smell of grass moments can there be, what other answer when what the soul echoes is so pure, so right, so whole and complete than that this is our home?
But there is no lesson like this in the day. No, there is the eventual aubergine wine stain that soaks into the horizon. There is the way that birdsong mutes and the hiss hiss of traffic on far distant roads slides into a background white noise, the wind chimes hang loosely asleep. That old, stray cat curls up on an abandon deck chair and watches the mosquitoes blearily gather in an early congregation around the shrine of sepia lamplight. The heat softens and falls to the asphalt. Everywhere, the smell of cooking, the clink of silverware and dishes, the wavering smear of porch bulbs.
Twilight spreads itself in cool blue breathes against our eyelashes and crows wheel in one final circle before dipping into shadow. Tomorrow approaches like a resurrection, and every moment lingers, a kiss on sleeping lips, a psalmed sigh and a leisurely scuffle of shoe down the long alleyway homeward. We have holes in our jeans and dirty noses. We are happy. We have lived.
