Blog o' Gnosis

When I was growing up, on Easter morning we’d come out to the dining room to find lovely big baskets full of malted milk ball eggs, chocolate bunnies and marshmallow chicks waiting for us. Later, my mom would hide jelly beans in the green shag rug of the living room and we’d go searching for them, a little less enthusiastically. Can there be anything less exciting, really, than finding a crushed lemon jellybean full of rug hairs and dirt? Fortunately there was chocolate to eat, so none of us had to dwell on the unfortunate jellybean portion of our second favorite Christian holiday. (I dimly recall earlier Easter egg hunts out in the grass, but I think in later years she got too tired to do that and downscaled the whole outdoor component. WWJD?)

I remember one Easter when I found in my basket a beautiful yellow sugar-coated “egg,” with a clear plastic window on one end looking into a bucolic scene of Springtime goodness. Green paper hills in front of a robin’s-egg blue sky with puffy white clouds in the background, flowers in the foreground, and a little bunny with a blue jacket (of course) hiding painted eggs in the grass. I thought it was the most beautiful, creative thing I’d ever seen. The fact that it was not to be eaten didn’t dampen my admiration of the egg, and I kept it on my dresser for weeks afterwards, peering into it whenever I had need of a happy thought. I don’t know what ever happened to it, but even favorite things in our house tended to disappear eventually, due to my mother’s executive judgment that they had worn out their usefulness or were attracting ants.

Every year thereafter I looked in my Easter basket with great anticipation for another sugared egg diorama, but we never got them again. I would see them in the stores and look longingly at the scenes inside, but I also noticed from year to year how their workmanship seemed to get increasingly shoddy. The seams of the outer eggshell showed, the window was loose or falling out, and the paper scene inside had a slapdash quality to it, poorly printed and carelessly glued. It might have been true, but it also coincided with my growing teenage disaffection for Christianity, and was no doubt a symptom of how difficult it was for me to have a happy thought during those turbulent years.

Fortunately, I could walk outside and within moments be standing alone on a wild hillside. By just sitting on a rock overlooking the bay, watching the deer graze and the vultures circle, I found a contentment similar to my earlier egg meditation, but on a scale that suited my growing mind and restless spirit. In time, as I left Christianity and began wandering through philosophy and world religions, I measured all religious experience against the feeling of beauty and expansiveness I experienced alone on that hill. In fact, I suppose I still do.

None of this ancient history would have come to mind, let alone found its way into a blog post, were it not for the everchanging Spring diorama that I find myself living in right now. Driving into town is a twenty-minute reverie of tender green hills, carpeted with brilliant yellow mustard flowers and orange poppies. Red-shouldered hawks perch on the telephone wires waiting patiently for gophers to peer up out of the soft earth. Above me the sky is impossibly blue, painted with a light hand and dashed with creamy swaths of cloud. The air is lightly misted, giving the whole scene a decoupage glow. Every moment is a new dawn of creation.

“Another day in paradise,” we say in greeting as we walk our dogs in the neighborhood. Nobody who lives here takes the natural beauty around us for granted. We know we’re incredibly lucky, and gratitude seeps into every conversation, even on the windiest, most bone-chilling days. This morning having a leisurely Palm Sunday breakfast at my kitchen table, I felt the interplay of sun and shadow on my back as the fog spread its way thinly across the incredibly blue sky. The wild roses across the street have offered their first fragrant pink blossoms, and I picked some for a bouquet along with flowering sage and purple daisies. I was born on Palm Sunday 45 years ago, and though today isn’t my actual birthday, I couldn’t have asked for a better time to come into the world, in such a beautiful season, on such a beautiful spot on the planet.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Family, Ritual, Spirit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.