Three Days in Spring

My regular readers (both of you) are aware that I am not particularly religious, in much the same way that Jupiter is not a particularly hospitable planet. This is not because I'm not familiar with the scripture - if anything, because I am. Which is why I can appreciate the cunning of setting the resurrection myth at the beginning of Spring. As though life from death were a good thing. Or rather, that our ability to perceive this great joke were. Intelligent Design indeed.

I've spent two days in the garden now, and tomorrow will be the third. Killing weeds. Tearing up unwanted wild raspberries. Hacking the limbs off perfectly healthy but overgrown bushes. The great destroyer, armed with clippers and rakes and hedgers and a chain saw. All to make room for new life. And if some of the bushes don't survive the onslaught no worries - they can be replaced with fresh ones. They won't be missed.

Or will they? There's the rub.

New life is a wonderful thing, no doubt. But it can never replace the old lives extinguished, the old loves lost, the flowers that never bloom again. And we alone perhaps in the universe get to understand that in time these too will fade, and new weeds will always return. The circle of life is necessarily a circle of death.

Which is why the resurrection myth is so appealing. This one time, and one time only, the same life comes back. The concept is wonderful to imagine.

I just would have chosen someone else to be that one.