I’ll Get a Rise Outta Ya! Springtime Musings…
I love springtime. Mother Earth feels to be rejoicing in springtime. Each day she awakens more and more from her slumber, as the bird chorus grows richer with returning singers, the trees are budding and blossoming, and the light of day is longer.
I am a child of April and I’ve always loved the celebratory feel of the season. When I was a little, I always hoped that my birthday would fall on Easter. I was not raised very religiously, but we did revel in the big holidays, and Easter was a flurry of new dresses and hats, egg decorating, post church family parties with tables full of ham and all the fixings, and big bright birthday bashes. I loved attending church on Easter, even if I did stumble over the story of the Resurrection. Jesus was someone that I felt close to, and I loved the music, the lilies and daffodils.
This springtime we again feel the quickening of Life, as Mother Earth is greened anew (at least in this part of the globe) and I, too, feel the quickening of new beginnings, of renewal stirring within my heart.
The seasons of Mother Earth are matched in my interior life as surely as they are within the chesty robin. These rhythms of renewal, of reaching up and out to the sun for warmth and food, after the winter season of darkness, of going inward, are deeply encoded within us. The great Sufi poet, Rumi said, “This outward spring and garden are a reflection of the inward garden.” This is the time of renewal, of rebirth, and of resurrection.
Resurrection is the essential drama of the west, whether or not you are a Christian. In exploring the story of resurrection from the mythical and psychological angle, the resurrection story holds deep meaning, potency and connection for each of us. We hold the possibility of, and might I say, the commitment to many resurrections in our lifetime.
In addition to the Christian story of Jeshua, as Jesus was named, there are numerous resurrection myths told from cultures around the world. There is the Egyptian story of Isis, who searches for the pieces of her beloved partner Osiris, whom she re-members and enlivens, and thus she becomes impregnated with her son Horus. There is the Greek Olympian story of Demeter, who, after grieving the abduction of her daughter Persephone by Hades, Lord of The Underworld, retrieves her daughter for 6 months of the year, creating the season of rebirth on the earth. The story of Adonis and Dionysus, and the Goddess Inanna are all stories of resurrection, life as it had been known, destroyed, and then remade. Here we understand that resurrection is the dying to oneself, then a time of transmutation or inner changing, and the subsequent re-emergence of the Greater Self.
The resurrection story lives in all of us. Indeed, each of us is encoded with the call to resurrection. We have just emerged out of the winter months, a time of darkness, a time of “dying” in Mother Earths cycling, to feel the springtime rhythms of resurgence, the budding of new ideas urging us to expansion. Many religious rituals and rites speak to the myth of dying to oneself and being reborn to a greater knowing of Self. The rite of a young person to adulthood, bar/batmitvah in the Judaic tradition, Confirmation in the Catholic, among many other rituals of more ancient traditions and indigenous cultures, is the understanding of dying to oneself as a child, and the awakening to greater acknowledgment of the community and one’s place within it.
Mythically and psychologically, resurrection is a re-membering of our TRUE nature. Resurrection is the vulnerability to new information and the evocation of a whole new being. Think about the challenges that you have faced or are presently facing today. These all have been calls to resurrection, to self -renewal.
When my mother passed away, I was thrown into a deep descent of grief, and I could barely recognize myself. For months and months, I was in the womb (the tomb) of darkness, the Underworld. I was engaged far beyond the controls and habits of my life, or that of the world around me. I was stripped of all I had known. I surrendered and ever so slowly, I was changed by new internal information and self-discovery. I died to my life as I had known it with my beloved Mother. Something deep within me was stirred and began to awaken. As Jean Huston has said, I was “pulsed into new patterns appropriate to [a] new place.” A new consciousness grew, and I ascended, and emerged with greater self-knowing and understanding.
The word resurrection comes from the Latin word, “resurgo”, meaning “I rise”. A proclamation of action! After the deep internal wombing, resurrection culminates in movement, progression, and growth, the moving aside of the stone, as the rhythms of Mother Earth teach us. The nature essayist John Burroughs wrote, “In April, all nature starts with you. You have not come out of your hibernaculum too early or too late: the time is ripe, and if you do not keep pace with the rest, why, the fault is not in the season.” Spring is an opportunity to see ourselves anew. Now is the time to bring forth the changes within us into the world. I Rise!
#TheEdgeofEveryday#LiveintheHive#RebirthandResurrection#IRise
