“The daffodils are coming up in my side yard,” she said. “I keep piling more leaves on top of them– it’s too soon!”
We’re all daffodils, so much latent life bundled up in a papery-skinned bulbs under the dark earth. The mind doesn’t believe spring will ever come again, but the body knows. The roots stretch down into the humus, toward the warmth that is its own kind of sun at the core of our earth.
We stood outside, coffees in hand, sparkling beside the lake. “I got sunburned the other day!” she told me. That is the antithesis of the smudge of ashes on my forehead, that is the proof of resurrection on par with a rolled away stone.
I wish Jesus would pop in and set some things straight: of course we should worship the sun, because what we’re really worshipping is hope, and what heaven is there to wish for but that?: The delight of what’s possible, the warmth after the cold, and the deeper knowing of ourselves because of the dark time, the root time, the rest.
I don’t have a garden bed to watch with any ownership right now, but I know I will, just as surely as the heat and melt and secret green are real, even when they’re out of sight.
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