It’s been a long winter. Three months or ten years, depending on how you count, but lately there are signs of spring. I can stand for hours in my bedroom looking at the white blossoms flooding the front yard, like hope surfing up on a wave to my window. Wind blows and the petals fall like snow, like a benediction.
And still I’m suspicious. Still I’m hesitant. It’s as if nature has rolled the stone away, but I’m reluctant to step outside.
I know first hand that winter doesn’t end just because the calendar shifts. In so many places in the world, it doesn’t matter what the calendar says: it is still winter. Some of our winters can last for a year, or ten. I have lived through winter so long, I forget that spring exists. I forget what it feels like, to be light.
I can see the beauty emerging in the world, but I still wonder if I deserve it. Who am I, what have I done, to earn joy? Is it even moral, to ask to thrive, when so much in the world is going wrong?
As far as we can tell, humans are the only being on the planet that wonders why we are here, the only species that wonders do we deserve this? We think this makes us wiser. But perhaps in all that we have learned, there is something we have forgotten, too.
Steve waved his hands in the air last night.
Ever since he saw the Hubble telescope pictures, he has been obsessed with the size of our planet. He happened across this picture on the internet, and it got him rolling again. This is the first year in twenty when he’s not preparing an Easter sermon, and he’s a bit undone.
“Do you know how amazing it is that we’re here?” he marveled.
He meant here in our sweet little house in West Asheville. He meant here with each other, in our marriage.
He also meant here, on this planet, in the whole wide world.
“I don’t know what preachers are thinking,” he said. “Why did the Church become so obsessed with sin? Think of how astonishing it is that we’re here!” He waves his hands some more, indicating the size of the cosmos. “On this little speck!”
He re-enacted the mind blown emoji.
“That is the only thing preachers should say from the pulpit ever,” he said. “Do you know? Do you realize? Do you even understand at all? It is an unfathomable miracle that we’re even here!”
I listened to him and I thought, maybe I am looking at all of this from the wrong perspective. Maybe I am thinking like the Church leaders of old. Thinking of all that is lacking in me, instead of all the abundance of the world itself.
The planet is suffering. We know this, for certain. The planet is in pain, and so are we.
And yet.
And yet.
And yet.
There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle. -- Albert Einstein
Sometimes, I think, we have evolved so far into our cerebral cortex, so far into our own private stories, that we forget. None of this is our story alone. Everything that is happening right now, everything in your own life, is part of a story so much unimaginably bigger than you can possibly understand.
I torture and torment and question myself, do I even deserve to be happy, have I earned the right to flourish, have I done enough, am I worth enough, is my life meaningful enough,
Perhaps that is why nature puts on such an ostentatious display every year. Because we can become so numbed by winter that we lose our faith in spring, and Mother Nature reminds us: see how many colors I can make. See how much higher the sun can arc across the sky. Watch the phlox emerge, almost moment by moment, the pink and purple that inch across the soil.
Maybe all I need to do is listen to the story, witness the life and color returning, to realize that the stone has rolled away. The world, for all that it is suffering, is putting on a glorious miraculous show and I have been invited to participate in it, and what an incredible miracle that is, what an unfathomable miracle.
Everything that is happening today is a part of a story that began with the Big Bang, a story that arced through billions of years of darkness, and floods of water, and a single cell deciding to divide, and keep dividing, by whose hand never to be known for sure, all the way through all of history to this moment, it is all one story, and I am no more and no less than one player in it.
And as a player in this huge story, maybe one of my biggest roles is not to find my own private deep purpose, but at the very least, to participate. Like a flower, or a phlox, spreading pink and purple across the soil. Like a baby lamb, wobbling and then leaping because oh my god what legs can do. Like a bear lying on its back in the river. Like a hawk soaring back to the same nest for years and years, home in this tree. Like a new flower that pokes out of the end of this ancient branch. Each one infinitely small on its own, microscopically invisible on its own, absolutely pointless in the scheme of things, and also, my God, so lucky, to get to be a part of this glorious show.
The colors and the light. The stories and the laughter. Those who are doing good work under so many circumstances we can’t even imagine. The infinite number of small kindnesses we will never witness, but are taking place all the same.
I struggle to trust myself, I struggle to trust the world, but maybe I need to let go of any grander purpose, and just participate.
Maybe the scariest moment is the first one.
Maybe all I need to do, after so much time in the darkness, is to gather my courage, step past that stone and stand, even for just a moment, in the astonishment of all this amazing light.
One of the most pleasing sights I treasure is the appearance of new buds and shoots coming out in the spring. They give me hope that there is a greater plan that I get to be part of,each and every spring!
Happy Easter
The stone is rolled away and He is Risen!
Hallelujah!!❤️