Easter

Trillium are rising out of the ground, I saw some today, walking in the rain. Daffodils have been dancing on the earth for weeks now, about to bow down to the flurry of tulips and iris that are bounding out of the garden ground. The earth is alive. We are alive!

It’s Easter! Easter comes to us every year as a celebration of life coming back, beginning again after long, cold, lonely winters, as they sing. Easter was derived from Eostre, a Germanic goddess of spring. The date for current day Easter was set in 325 C.E. at the Council of Nicaea as the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox.

Easter is a religious holiday observing the resurrection of the living Christ. What is more important than that? To acknowledge the living Christ resurrecting our lives. It happened, not only two millennia ago, but it has happened many times in the lives of so many people who have failed and begun again, people who have lost it all, even their entire families, but carried on and found happiness.

It has happened to me and to you perhaps as we awaken to life within as a spiritual and deeply personal experience, and not just what happens on the outside. It happens when we experience change that is an aspect of transformation, as we morph from earth bound caterpillars to spirit bound butterflies. Or, you pick your own image, be it a bumblebee or honey bee, a hummingbird or hawk, heron or eagle, a bear, wolf or whale, dolphin or turtle.

Easter is a wonderful time in which we gather together to remember that what happened as Jesus Christ walked through the barrier of death to reveal much grander and more vast dimensions of life in this universe than mankind had ever imagined or believed. It’s time to take a leap in joy, just as the trillium, leaping out of the ground to proclaim, “I’m alive!!!”