Spring and the Moon of Liberation
Sunday gratefuls: Exercise. Artemis. Planting today. Tomatoes. Carrots. Beets. Check garlic. Fantasy. Writing. AI. Medical Alert.
Rene Good. Alex Pretti. Say their names.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Parsha
Kavannah: Areyvut. Mutual responsibility. All humans are accountable one to another.
Tarot: Queen of Stones, Bear. Strength rooted in Mother Earth. I know mortality in decay, in cancer, in Kate. I choose to live because of these, not in spite of them.
One brief shining: Artemis has been through her first winter–what passed for winter this year. Her Japanese lanterns glow at night. Ten bulbs of garlic have wintered in her west-facing raised bed. I will plant carrots and beets in that bed today, check the garlic. Prep the tomato bed, plant the seeds. Flowers of memory in the east-facing bed: gladiolus and stargazer lilies for Jon, purple iris for Kate.
Nowruz. The Persian New Year. Passover, the annual reliving of liberation from oppression. Easter, the annual celebration of life’s ongoingness. Spring.
If our Shadow Mountain April has no snow, it will be our cruelest month. Letting us slide into summer with little moisture for lodgepoles and aspens, grasses, dogwood, willows.
Spring holidays acknowledge our deepest fears. Easter. Is death the enemy? Passover. Are we enslaved in our narrow places, with no hope of liberation?
Nowruz. Will the growing season begin well?
Artemis. My nod to Nowruz. Planting in expectation of blood-red beet salads, carrots cooked in butter and brown sugar.
Gardening. A ritual of confidence. A collaboration. Hands, seeds, soil, and sun. I love taking the prickly beet seeds in my palm, pinching one between thumb and finger. Planting it, pressing the soil down around it. Tucking it in. Spring.
Fourth phase. In May of 2015 prostate cancer showed up, death knocking, no longer an abstraction but presence. A shock, yes. Yet not a shock either. Mortality begins at birth.
Health? My body equilibrated, functioning well. What health isn’t: a permanent state. Even for those seeking life extension.
I remember sunrise services, a melding of Christian yearning to defeat death and pagan confidence in the sun. Transform the fallow season into the growing season. Once again. Life after death.
Tara invited me again to her Passover.
A full Haggadah with afikomen hidden, questions about plagues, conversation about contemporary mitzrayim: in society, in ourselves. Mitzrayim. A narrow place of bondage. Egypt.
Ancient myth as contemporary history. Our story of liberation from slavery. Of the heroes and heroines who led us out of Egypt, across the Reed Sea, and into freedom.
What is the evanescence of health against these muscular affirmations: life lived through fallow seasons, life confronting and transforming death, oppression changed into freedom, into a tribe?
Sun.
Soil.
Seeds.
Spring.









