asking us to open, to give rise to a song. – Elizabeth Howart in Mend and Hone
© 2008 Corrie Barklimore, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio
I’m not sure how to open and sing today, Good Friday, when much is expected, a weightedness given to the day. I don’t feel weighted. For the first time in many, I feel light, free, open.
Maybe my days call in Easter too soon. Or speak of the light that Esther felt, her people safe after she lived in “such a time as this.”
I just can’t settle into death today, can’t reconcile my gilded heart with blood and nails.
So I’m singing light. Fresh. Sweet. Like hyacinth air.
If we had a lamb, I would rub my face into its neck. . . a basset hound will have to do.
This morning, I woke to find the weeping cherry in the front yard opening to her pink fullness, the forsythia glowing even in the cloudy day.
Rain has arrived – the quintessential spring shower – to water in the new strawberries, rhubarb, lettuce, kale, cabbage, onions, and leeks.
It feels cliche to say that spring means hope, but today, for me, just now, it does.
I look at the grass turning verdant again, study the buds on the apple tree just outside the window – the tiny petals of leaves reshaping the entire skeleton of her being.
I do not know how to be anything but joyful.
So today, I seize that joy and sing that song. For tomorrow or Sunday, sorrow may arrive again, no matter what the calendar says.
How is your song today? Reflective? Joyful? Grief-laden? Sing a bit of it for me?