Easter

– From E.B. White’s introduction of his late wife’s essays entitled
Onward and Upward in the Garden.

The only moment in the year when she actually got herself up for gardening was on the day in fall that she had selected, in advance, for the laying out of the spring bulb garden. The morning often turned out to be raw and overcast, with a searching wind off the water — an easterly that finds its way quickly to your bones.

Armed with a diagram and a clipboard, Katharine would get into a shabby old Brooks raincoat much too long for her, put on a little round wool hat, pull on a pair of overshoes, and proceed to the director’s chair — a folding canvas thing — that had been placed for her at the edge of the plot. There she would sit, hour after hour, in the wind and the weather, while Henry Allen produced dozens of brown paper packages of new bulbs and a basketful of old ones, ready for the intricate interment. As the years went by and age overtook her, there was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance on this awesome occasion — the small, hunched-over figure, her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in the dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.

Sophocles 

 “There are many strange and wonderful things in this world, but none stranger than man.”

And one of them, a doctor of the Law, putting him to the test, asked him, "Master, which is the great commandment in the Law?" 

Jesus said to him, "'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind.' 

This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like it, 

'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 22:35-40) Let us remember the second great commandment that arises from the first. I do not think it was intended to be taken as lightly as we have taken it. 

Let's also be reminded that the celebration of the Resurrection is a celebration of the wedding between the divine and the human. That, if the scriptures are to be believed, the Lord saw each and every human being as worth saving, as special, as exceptional, as we'd all like to see ourselves in our heart of hearts. It's a good day for reflecting on the mystery and the wonder of divinity and humanity.

A last reflection from an old essay

In Vernazza, the small fishing boats bobbed gently in the bay, and the lights of the city lay across the harbor like a lover’s silky slip, and the combination of dark water, small foreign towns, and being stranded from even language made us feel gloriously alone. When we left, the tracks wandered through hills striped by vineyards and into mountain tunnels that opened to views of the Ligurian Sea, and the whole ride my wife took pictures while I read a book about the founding of Rome, and no one bothered to check our tickets or ask us any questions to make sure we belonged, and we still arrived safely, in the arms of some far away heavenly city. Reader, listen closely to the churning of the wheels, to the train’s thumping engine beneath your feet, watch the waves settle into the shore, they are all one, listen to all these sounds as we travel together to the same city. Reader, You are loved.