Resurrection
“It’s like a car,” she says. “Only you push it.”
I like that she doesn’t know the word lawnmower. I wish nobody knew the word lawnmower. I wish there were a world where everybody walked through a forest, where yards were unknown, where a king never made a moat and slaves never clipped what grew. My dad used to say, “Wish in one hand and shit in the other. See which one fills up faster.”
It will be Easter in two days, the day Jesus rose from the dead. We got married the week before this in a place that really felt like a forest. Never been to Gainesville, Florida. Had no idea that the entire city looked like what you see while walking around the swamps and down the boulevard in City Park here in New Orleans. Giant oaks and other trees where Spanish moss hangs and everything green. Everything alive. Everything leaning over homes so that each seems it’s own cottage and the city seems like the country and the highway seems to reach from both sides just like through the forests of Northern California, through the forests of Washington State.
This is where life happens. When one tree falls, another drops a seed and the fallen tree feeds this. And those who wrote about Jesus, they knew this, and those who wrote about Osiris and Ra, they did, too. Even Mary Shelley knew this when she wrote about Dr. Frankenstein and what he saw beyond a dead body.
Death becomes life and old ideas give rise to freshly fallen thought. So what if this weed whacker, this lawn, this entire place is here for this same resurrection? What if the new neighbor that I met today sees the way I swept the grass from the driveway and used this to lay down around surinam cherry? And what if there is always a way?
A way to kneel to the ground and see how much we miss, a way that even sand dropped across a lot by a contractor knows to call for birds to drop seeds and disrupt the attempts of grass. What else might be missed?
I can always do better. I can always find ways to fit in. To sweep the excess grass from the concrete after it drifts from weed whacker string spinning. I can section each spot of sidewalk and driveway and take one space at a time, sweep blades into a dustpan and let this death feed.
In this there is meditation. In everything. In the way Thich Nhat Hanh ate an orange. In the way you can eat an orange. In the way you always stand to put on your socks. In the way that everything that grows feeds everything else.
We stopped at a rest stop in Mississippi. There were plastic eggs inside the booth where they kept maps and guidebooks. I thought of chocolate. I thought of drugs. I thought of consciousness watching all of this. How quick a kid gets fixed? How quick Easter becomes all about getting.
What if death is necessary? What if every moment gives us an opportunity to see this. Die to self. It is only through this that we are reborn. It is only through this that we are able to see that Jesus is a leaf and an idea is a fallen tree and a new idea is a seed and everyday is Easter.
