Easter Sunday: Past, Present....Future?

Happy Easter.

And for Easter there shall be a post - it cannot be helped. And maybe even a poem link - that too cannot be helped.

Some years ago, 7 to be precise, on Easter Sunday a friend of mine Beth and I went over to a place - which at that point seemed to be at least 47 miles away from Lafayette. It's not that far off. It's probably 20 miles possibly from the other side of the river. A place called Wild Cat Creek. We got there very, very early in the morning and it was a mild spring day - a little cold possibly but only that tingle of a cold that comes with early dawn. We went there armed with huge cups of gas-station coffee and a doughnut each and some books in our bags. It's a quiet place, that place. A little creek flows through and on the other side there were the dark green sylvan woods. I had to splash around in the creek at some point but the waters were icy and cold and I hopped around in them still and then had to get out without venturing too far. Dense green - the woods stood on the other side, and I was about to say with a cabin that could be seen hidden by the leaves. But that's not true. I had imagined a cabin there. While sitting on the side of the creek I kept telling Beth that if I could I'd build a cabin and live there on that side and do not much else. I'd have to make sure that the cabin had good plumbing - that's all. I'd cross the creek and go to town to get groceries every ten days or so and I'd do not much else but live in the cabin, which I could see very clearly, and have a private sign to keep all trespassers out because, I think, Beth might have said what if people came to visit. And so there we sat, drank coffee, had our mighty doughnuts. Beth read. I don't know what I did very well but at some point I fell into a deep, deep sleep right next to the creek. I woke up to feel my face crusty and Beth when she looked at me burst out laughing. Beth is normally a quiet person but when she laughs, she laughs. And she did. My face had gotten sunburnt. For it was close to noon and I had been sleeping with my face facing the sun.

We spent some more time there. I don't know what we did or whether we spoke much or at all or whether Beth read her book and I scribbled in a diary or read or not but it was what it was. And later on we'd gone and had some sandwiches for lunch. The evening before we'd gone to a church around the corner from where I now live. The evening service hadn't begun, which was good because I'd just wanted to sit quietly and not listen to anyone speaking. Just look around and look at Jesus Christ on the Cross and so that's what I did. And I didn't want to ask for anything but I kept asking him to give me the courage on Easter Sunday. That was all. Although I kept thinking later that I'd told Christ that He must let things work out for the better right then and there. We sat there, Beth and I, for a long while. I had my own lack of thoughts but there were swiveling bursts around in my mind...I wanted to feel peaceful. I wanted to feel calm. I wanted to feel certainty. But none of that happened, I don't think. I kept sending Christ some happy messages though hoping that he was doing well no matter where He was. How on earth do human beings so matter-of-fact-ly nail someone to the Cross and so many of them and him too? It was 'round the same time that I was still reading The Last Temptation of Christ I remember and having a very difficult time...anyhow, we sat there and then got up and had a young priest come over and smiling with quiet restraint he told both Beth and me to come over to Mass later on or on Sunday. I think I may have answered or grunted or smiled.

It's an Easter weekend which always crops up in my mind now and again....and later sometimes during the year I felt bad not because things didn't work out for the better right away but I honestly thought that Christ, of all people, hadn't heard my prayer. But how could He not? But it wasn't that He hadn't heard....maybe He had heard a little too clearly - who knows. And at some point there was that song playing in my dorm room that year - Turn! Turn! Turn! by The Byrds.
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Yesterday, some twenty minutes or so past noon, I stomped out for a walk to a place I'm rather fond of. I'm glad I live in this town with a river so close. It's Spring now and we've been having a lot of rain lately and so the river is in flood and looks different every other day. A place now and then glistens, invitingly. So sometimes trails are found. Sometimes slightly hidden paths are explored with a grin sometimes and sometimes with curiosity and sometimes even hesitatingly. Yester' a new direction was taken up. And rises into vision?...

I'd lived near - right near the river for about a year - some years ago - and I'd never taken so many trips to it. I'd never looked much. I liked it. I felt it but didn't let anything seep in too much. The river yesterday had flooded and submerged the path that runs on the opposite direction to my normal route. I got to the point where the path had gone down under and I wished yet again that I had a working camera. But no camera and so hard luck. I turned back and then noticed that they'd built a proper deck for the canoes and the water boats belonging to the Purdue crew team. I walked out on the wooden planks. Some of them seemed to sway gently - probably my imagination - but out I went to the very edge and looked and looked and loved and grinned even though my heart felt the pangs but a different one from last year....I searched for a cigarette but I'd forgotten my pack! Ack! No point in sitting for too long without a cigarette...when lo and behold - a half cigarette emerged from one of the pockets of my bag. A silent smoke, some more shared half-smiles while looking out into the river and then a quick order: Time to get up and walking. And so I leapt up. I turned around running along lightly along the wooden plank I saw a young boy and girl standing near the deck towards the shoreline...they were waiting there with half-wondering looks on their faces. They grinned. I grinned. I realised then that they'd probably been waiting there waiting for me to head back from the far end of the deck before they went there. You know...it's one of those things. Giving folks some private space even on public land because one doesn't want to intrude. I was grateful rather...

Off to buy cigarettes it was and a trip down into the campus area, and near a middle-eastern restaurant, the pleasant and polite elderly owner was bellowing pleasantly at his sister-in-law's very young kid who was running around in the car park, "Miriam! Miriam! Go back inside. Go back inside." I looked up and he smiled his usual smile at me with the, "How are you?" greeting. He doesn't take no answer. An answer must be provided and so he waits. I nodded and smiled and finally replied and raised the question myself...which was fine actually considering nobody was hurriedly walking around building corners.

In the eve' there was another walking trip and I re-visited The Church, which now rests around my corner, for the first time since that Easter. But evening mass was already on the run and so I waited near the door. It was dark though inside the Church. Only a flickering candle could be seen and I couldn't make out Jesus on the Cross very clearly - only the form. I stood where I was and heard a hymn which I hadn't heard before and it was joyously sung. I waited for a little longer but then a young woman was reading out so badly from a section on Moses that I grimaced and turned around. She really should have practiced reading well. A flat monotone and stumbles over words are not somethings particularly inspiring on Easter Saturday. I wandered a bit around the Church. There was a statue of Mary. A calm statue it was and she was looking not towards the gazer but her gaze was lowered. It was a peaceful statue somehow. And there were three crosses of different heights draped with white cloth. I don't know what the three crosses really symbolized - maybe the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost? - but those three also seemed to fit there somehow even though the space around where I wandered was dark with only the fading natural light making its way in through the glass doors. There was not much else to see there and no other rooms to wander around and so off I went off for my second walk for the day.

I chant still. For every waking moment - I chant while doing whatever it is that I'm doing. I stare too much though, I still think. Stare away into space in front of me. Some shard here is much too precious in life and it is not a matter that brooks much detachment although restraint and balance are indeed matters that require much practice and failing and learning and practice and failing and hopefully some amount of actual practice bit by bit. I try. I do. And I'll try harder - that's an unfailing promise. Some weeks ago - maybe a month it was - it was near a particular stretch of the river that I read in peace a piece on The Buddha's words...who knows what is to be? One can but say Que sera sera...I guess with a half-grin and whatever else within while pausing for a bit to let the present be.

It's Easter and so a poem that once again, yes, my friend on the right sent me many years ago is something that I'm putting up here. Thank you. Maybe some who haven't come across it before might feel the same or similar throbbing within and the pins and needles like icicles on the out upon reading it - and those who already have might like re-visiting it. The poem is appropriately titled Easter, and is well, about the Resurrection. (I had earlier mistaken the poem to be titled Resurrection) and is by John Niehardt. A couple of his other poems that I bond with are 'April, The Maiden' and 'L'Envoi'....

God bless....

Once more the northbound wonder
Brings back the goose and crane,
Prophetic sounds of thunder
Apostles of the rain.

In many a battling river
The broken gorges boom,
behold the Mighty Giver
Emerges from the Tomb!

Now robins chant the story
Of how the wintry sward
Is litten with the glory
Of the angel of the Lord.

His countenance is lightning
And still his robe is snow
As when dawn was bright'ning
Two thousand years ago.

O who can be a stranger
To what has come to pass?
The pity of the Manger
Is mighty in the grass -

Undaunted by Decembers
the sap is faithful yet:
the giving earth remembers
And only men forget.