Easter I

Just found this post in the archive, a forgotten post from the first week of Easter... part of my Easter processing this year, as I tried to lean more heavily into the resurrection that comes after solemn lent and Easter.  Since the summer sun has come out and dried out some damp places in my heart, I'm putting a name to the fog I've been feeling: depression.  Don't worry, I'm on it.  I'm determined when I figure out a name for a problem.  First step is opening up and asking lots of people for help.

 It feels good to let the cool, fresh air in.  Interestingly, I think quitting Facebook helped immensely in this process.

Anyhow, the piece below was too good to let it moulder in the drafts folder, and the sentiments still stand.  Enjoy!

***

The weather has turned now.  The sun shook off her gray veil for two glorious weeks, bringing everything to life.  First the snowdrops and bluebells.  Then the daffodils and tulips.  The cherry and apple blossoms.  And after two weeks dropping everything to go to the park morning and evening: me.

The rain fell again just after Easter.  Of course it had to come again.  But that day the earth let off her thirsty smell, that smell of heat and dust and grass washed clean.  I could remember why I like rain again.

I didn't write my lenten thank you's.  I meant to, intended to, "didn't have time" to, didn't really want to.

I have, however, been writing.  I've been writing through the hard places that I didn't want to write down.  Facing down the shame of my failures, or, better said, the moments that I thought were my greatest failures.  But now, for whatever reason, I'm seeing them differently. 

I'm learning now, three months in, that the years between 30 and 40 look significantly different than the years between 20 and 30.  Perhaps it is mostly motherhood that is teaching me this, but I don't think that's the whole story.  Time moves relentlessly these days, each day a tinier percentage of the whole of my life than the one before it.  And I move through time more and more awkwardly.

Some days I am so tired I just want time to pass.  I just want the alone that comes during naptime, after bedtime, on my writing mornings.  Yet when it comes, I hardly ever stop to face it, welcome it, mark it, let it mark me.  Instead I have a long list of things to squeeze out of it: lunch, chores, research, youth work, writing.  And many days, instead of getting even one drop, I turn to something mindless to just make it pass.  Not sleep, or reading books or good work, just sitting, miserable, in mindless corners of the Internet, mostly.

In the moments when I am alive, I struggle.  I struggle with unresolved memories, pouring in and piling up like all the junk overflowing from my closets.  I struggle with what I long for and what I hate.  I struggle with a lot of things.

I struggle with the realization that living well looks fear and death in the face continually and says over and over to them:  "and?"  Because fear and death are on their way out of this world. (Come, Lord Jesus!)  They are being swallowed up by resurrection.

Anyway, I'm working on it.