Easter Sunday

Easter dinner on the good china. My wife's parents both here, spring finally peeping. We walked to Mass and I threw a baseball with my son for a bit in the afternoon. My daughter and I went on a short bike ride and she led me to monkey bars at her old preschool. During the course of the day our kids entertained us with songs, "shows," and history projects. And just out the door in a small patch of garden, our arugula has germinated and a few other things are fluttering beneath the floating row cover, used not so much for temperature support but to keep ravenous squirrels from seeds.
Minnesota is waking up again.
But back to Easter for a moment. I think we mark time with holidays, mark time against its broader movement - the time that swoops us along - by remembering the rhythms and rituals we've inherited, invented, believed in. Time is too big, too fast, and in the eddies of Christmas, Easter, anniversaries, we recount our stories, tell our histories, remember the dead. And today feels like it's for the living, for walking in sunshine and tending to plants and children. This morning, on my knees, my eyes closed and my thoughts racing still, I wondered how I can find a way to say and be all the things inside me. How do I connect the life in me to the lives around me? I want to pass on these rituals of sitting and eating and talking and praying and hand washing-and-drying the dishes on Sunday because I, too, participate in this continuum of time.
Isn't each seed we plant connected to the beginning of time? When I hold a seed in my hand, it's the present of an unbroken succession of generations of seeds and plants going back in time, through time, before this specific variety or species even existed, (and still it travels backwards,) remembering in itself the time before it was what it is, because while there may be a beginning to the differentiation that marks the origin of this species there is no beginning of the life that spawned it, until we return to the beginning, and when I plant the seed I participate in the continuing story of life itself. Because the seed in my hand, the one I just planted, is here after all. It's managed after all its generations of mutations and droughts and competition among other species to be here. This life, this seed, this love, wants only to burst out and grow.