Easter at Full Bloom

My wife Eden loves Easter. I’ve never been a huge fan. It conjures up to mind pastel colors, bad candy, and disturbing Easter bunnies trying to ride on the coat tails of Santa but failing miserably. Coupled with a lot of commercialization and a general lack of “spiritedness” or reverence for the sacred. After sweet little Easter egg hunt on Sunday things are shifting around a bit in my world. First off the egg dying was a great excuse to get together and make some fun art together. We used these natural dyes that our friend Leah makes (check her out at http://bit.ly/1mvuq7T ) and made all sorts of truly gorgeous eggs. Disentangling all my less than favorable notions of Easter I found myself engaged in a process of turning this blank, yet profoundly shaped object, a chicken egg, into a piece of art.

Easter Morning after we had another epic waffle and whip cream community brunch, Eden and I went into the community garden and started to delicately and somewhat mischievously place these egg shaped art pieces in the shade of rocks, on top of sprinkler heads and in the coil of the garden hose. Then the kids were unleashed and that was the biggest joy: to see them totally transfixed, carrying their baskets and joyously grabbing eggs from here and there. In that moment I realized how simple and a profound of a ceremony we had created. I didn’t think of it as such initially, but that’s truly what it is. Its a sequence of events, of movements that bring the community of humans in closer contact with the mystery and the beauty of this life. The realization also hit me that ceremonies can be fun and a chance to bring more art and a magic into our lives.