Spring Springs Early
There’s the calendar on my workday desk which marks time passing with boxes and lines and numbers. Then there’s the calendar Nature keeps. Spring came a little early in March this year. The birds of the huerta began to sing, common swifts and Eurasian blackbirds and magpies and collared doves, monk parakeets and even house sparrows– just a little too loud! Like kids who been couped up in the car on a rainy road trip suddenly sing when their favorite song comes on.
I was struck by the marvel of the world suddenly growing warmer, and brighter, and louder, and more colorful. Zas! Dead things all around me coming to life, fruit and nuts and berries and deer suddenly bursting forth out of nowhere, new life, bearing us all boons. Although I no longer have that blueberry bush I once had in the mountains of Vermont, and though I don’t hunt, I began to think of the sacrifice of gentle creatures like the rabbit make for the pobres de la tierra, or some such.
Struck, I say, I was.
But particularly if I had not been so struck, I’d have started my Easter preparations early. Because I was struck hard, I began them right on time but vi et armis.
My easter preparations begin in my wooly head first, where Spring thoughts wheel around in a singular shimmering diamond unity, hard won and dark-pressed out of stressed-out-beyond-pressure-anybody-should-have-to-put-up-with-carbon me.
Being a unity, these thoughts, my, they’re hard to unspool. Let me unspool them forward from childhood, and forward in the history of humanity. We start then with what is from childhood, and what is earlier as calendars go.
When I was little, my first Easter memories are of bright Easter baskets found in the sun-dappled yards of the Verdugo mountains or our yellow-weeded side yard in El Sereno, with wondrous eggs—eggs, of all things!—brought by the Easter Bunny.
In our kitchen, we performed the ritual in a timeless, and sweet vinegar-smelling, and possibly in those days, red-and-blue-dyed-carcinogenic manner. My next older brother Joe’s eggs were elaborate with pin stripes; mine, the simple deep blue of the robin’s egg. Great solemnity in the air there was, and great joy, too.
And when I placed the egg in the basket, I felt a great, very great magic and mystery, the self-same as I felt when I found my first basket of all and thought about chickens laying eggs and bringing them to us when Spring came.
Where’d the Easter Bunny get the eggs? I mean, there is no possible explanation—bunnies don’t lay eggs or hang out with chickens. Bunnies are mostly wild, and chickens, mostly farm animals. Did some chicken fly the coop on a nookie run? Does the head rabbit have an egg contract with the rooster wrangler? These thoughts would rattle around in my little huero head, even later in life after I myself started helping to assemble and put out the baskets, either for my little siblings of the older ones who still wanted one. I want one, to this day.
Spring comes all at once, and makes everything alive go bananas, then melty vanishes like two scoops of lady ice cream into Summer. Spring: she has to be behind all this business, with her fuzzy, and clucky, and huero minions one and all, but how? And more to the point, why?
Well, as a boy, I felt the emotional unity. And because I did, the wonder and mystery of it all struck me—so think it out, I did not, for need to think it out, I did not.
Only later, as golden reason dawned, did I realize the why, in the nature of things, Spring and her bunnies did their dark and mysterious, bright and chirpy work. My knowing moved from something I knew in my bones and blood and flesh, upwards toward my sky eyes and brain.
The Easter Spirit, Spirits, and Spirituality
Our word “Easter” comes from the Old English Eastre, a word from the Anglo-Saxon goddess Oestre, whose festival was held during the Anglo-Saxon month of Oesturmonap, or something like that. You know, April.
You want some philology? The German name for their Spring goddess acts as a bridging link to the more ancient Goddess on the continent, Ostara, suggesting a broad and ancient presence.
We know much of what we know of Eostre from story teller, Bede. Some thought he just made it up. Later evidence found around when I was born supported Bede’s story, hurray, though the debate raged on, blah blah blah. We know better than to disregard stories. We know stories aren’t just “things you make up.” We know stories can be about things deeply felt and known in our bones. Well, here’s the story known in our bones.
Oestre—let’s call her Easter—is the goddess of Spring. Before you get your vestments in a twist, remember, or go learn, that the primitive ground of religion is not natura naturata but natura naturans, that is, not the products of Spring, but mystical Spring’s process and source. Or if you want fancy words—ancient humanity was more panentheist than pantheist. Easter, I am trying to say, is she from whom Spring springs.
Now everything dies or nearly dies in winter, then Easter springs forward, overflows with abundance—so much so, that Easter herself can jump genders, and species, she, a shape shifter and hermaphrodite.
Why? Because of course Spring makes material nature come unglued, so abundant, so passionate, that nature blows past ordinary forms and goes nuts—cats lying down with dogs, young lovers running up into the hills, wine flowing, you know, the whole lot of it. And so, Easter also represents sacred marriage, and so, love. Love, understood as an overpowering source of abundance, new life, and birth.
As we all know, all rules break down and ordinary order goes out the window when you start a family. If not, you’re not doing it right.
In Germanic myth, Easter shape-shifts a bird into a bunny. Then, the hermaphro-hare lays eggs for her festival. Note the circularity, at least if any of the eggs are fertile.
A Digression
(I am frankly afraid to try to find out if they’re fertile. I’m afraid to take an Easter egg, warm it under a lamp, hoping it’s fertilized by some odd coincidence, for fear that something might emerge that will be half rabbit. Seriously.
And, I don’t fear it because it could hurt me, or might blight me, though it might, I mean, I don’t mind playing with Easter fire. No, I fear it because then the press might find out and send some philistine with a PhD to say, “Well, that’s just a coincidence. Not a miracle.”
But a miracle is just a coincidence that means something, right? What my phobia-generated PhD says is, “Well, these things JUST happened to happen together.” Of course, they can’t justify the “JUST.” The JUST, science cannot justify. Science can only say: “I have no explanation.”
I wish journalists would not put a microphone in front of PhDs who can’t stop with what they know about my “rabbin”—no, I like “chick-et,” it’s saucier—which is, specifically, nothing. “Coincidence” means, we cannot explain in the way science explains, which is, “There is a reason for these things to happen together, a reason in the nature of things. There’s a connection, which the nature of the things that were involved, explains.” Or says, “there is no connection to be found by us that would explain it.”
If the latter, be quiet then, get up, go back to the lab and somebody give me the mike and I’ll tell you how an Easter egg begat the chicket. Then I might cross myself because I don’t want to blaspheme Easter and be speared by some mad Spring stag in mid-town Manhattan. That that should happen would be a coincidence, but I would still be dead with blood on my own hands, as it were.)
The Meaning of Bunnies Bearing Eggs
But I digress. Now, as to why Easter takes the form of a bunny, or sends a bunny to do her doings—who knows which?—remember that the noble bunny lives its entire life for love. That’s what bunnies do. You may not know this, but they breed like rabbits. Many are their number each Spring. Bunnies are the perfect mechanism Easter generates through the Big Bang and evolution and all that, to feed us all. Bunnies are easy to hunt. They are so trusting and high in protein, and “inexhaustible.” Both in number and because they never get tired of love, and are emotionally resilient. Their high murder rate, they seem to feel, is just part of life, so they keep right on trusting and most of all, loving.
Primitive man of course was keenly attuned to such a loving, gentle, sacrificial nature. Not for nothing does Easter give the form of basket-bearing bunnies to her bright minions, to bring us these eggs to remind us of nature’s wild bounty and loving sacrifice for us.
I remind you, and closer my brethren, of the kind and gentle God of Pulque, Thousand Rabbit, the God of Sacrifice, who was killed by the more modern God of Domination and Subjugation. The Gods then gave Thousand Rabbit the moon as its home, and at night, you can still see the Rabbit-in-the-Moon– the moon, the symbol of change and shape shifting and night mysteries.
We act out these rituals in the kitchen smelling of apple cider vinegar, and in the yellow grass or among the oak trees. They remind us of the sacrifice of Easter, who gave her eggs to nourish us, and remind us to be gentle and loving and sacrificing, because otherwise the wheel of nature will grind to a halt and Forever Winter would descend upon us. So we make baskets and dye eggs, go hunting for eggs that the rabbit brought, and even in the suburbs, we feel something mysterious all around us, just over that fence and beyond that gate.
Which brings me to Jesus. Because I told you I was going to go forward in time in two ways at once.
Jesus and Easter
Later in life than when the baskets began, I read, then much later understood, another story (that more men in lab coats think is only about coincidences, but let’s leave them out of this. Sorry, they haunt my dreams. I think I have a doctorate in my closet or under the bed.) In this other story, God—the One God, the God of Light and Reason, the God which represents the Unity of the Godhead and all things Divine, Wakan Tanka, you know, the Big Kahuna—sent his Son to the earth to teach us how to be gentle and meek, and to protect the gentle and meek. He was doomed to be murdered by the human forces of Domination and Subjugation. He taught, more than anything else, joy and love, a love that was, that could be so overflowing, that you even loved the Samaritan.
The Samaritans were the guys whom the Jews disliked so much, they’d cross the river when they went through the Samaritan barrio. Him, Jesus said, you had to love.
Jesus came to the world when was developing science, and architecture, and advanced music, and complex sets of rules of all kinds like legal and religious codes, taught us that, without constant renewal of these things through careful self-examination and the light of conscience, goodness and holiness would die out of the world. A more abstract, a more philosophical, but still, a spiritual message, one better suited to the men who had left farm and field and come into contact with cities and empires.
Some would say that this subtle change in the message of Easter, from the abundance of Spring, to the miracle of moral and spiritual renewal, is just a coincidence.
So maybe it’s also just a coincidence that Jesus was the last Hebrew prophet, the first Hebrew prophet to be a God made man, a God born human, who bore the message that ritual dies when it loses its inner fire, inner intensity, deep meaning, who came, then died, then comes again—who during the Spring, rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, wonder of wonders—
—and that Dionysus was the last Greek God, the first God to walk among us, as a man. And is the god who comes, then dies, then is resurrected, over and over again, and that his rites are wild returns to the natural state; that his drink is wine, not pulque, because the Greeks have grapes and not cactus, but still, that his mode of being, was joyful partying down; that he came bearing the message, law and order lose their meaning and become corrupt, and oppressive, if they lose their connection to the natural world and the spirit of joy; and that his season is the Spring.
Out with the Baskets, In with the New
Maybe it’s just coincidences. Maybe they are just stories.
Or maybe Somebody is trying to tell us Something. That’s the feeling I get, when I also start to get the meaning of that Message, from where? But hey, part of the message seems to be that some messages you get are mysterious.
Some messages about the marvels of nature arrive from the men in coats, or other scientists, giving us messages. Others, bunnies bring in baskets even and maybe especially when the bunnies are just us, the night before.
And then, we put Easter baskets out on Easter Sunday.
Happy Easter.