Easter Rising

I just wanted to say, while I'm at it and blogging, that I am frankly aware that a number of readers on this blog read it just to know that I'm still alive, with that faintly quiet reassurance that the blogger isn't:

• A dog (mine, a Westie, to be specific)
• A significant other (but nobody specific)
• A neurotic necrotic
• A glitch in the stream of consciousness

No, jokes aside - I am well, and very much alive, and living - actually living (imagine that!).

It snowed on Easter Sunday.

I've always been warned, and this year was no exception, by the weather service and well meaning colleagues and radio broadcasters that it typically snows around Easter. Why it snows in spring here instead of winter is always going to elude me. But come Easter Sunday, after a sunshine filled dawn, a swirling, white powder began to fill the air, and danced in front of the window.

There was a strangely sweet sort of pleasure watching visibly white bits swirl in front of your eyes. I'm not quite sure what it is. This Easter was celebrated in strangely sweet, quiet sort of ways. I baked a carrot cake, I gave up Coke (the soft drink, not the other kind) for Lent, I walked the dog for an especially long time, I watched Grey's Anatomy.

And then I realised what this small, quiet joy is. It's the comfort that one gets when baking cookies on a sad day. It's the warmth of a kitten's cuddle on a cold day.

It is often said that on Easter, Christ's rising from the the dead is like the breaking of dawn after a long, dark night. It's often represented as the glorious, bright and resplendent ascension of the sun, choirs of angels optionally included.

I like to think instead that the breaking of dawn on Easter day is like any other dawn on any other day. A silent peace that creeps upon you, small and quiet, on a gentle breeze lightly kissing your cheek as you stir and open your eyes, semi-conscious of another day laid like dreams at your feet. Filled with promise, with hope.

No choirs of angels. No fifth symphony.

Love, like redemption, like grace, like promise, like hope, comes without a declaration, arrives without notice, departs without a by-your-leave.

How do we know today's the day among days? And that yesterday, things were different than they were tomorrow?

We mark the moments in our days, months, years, the hours that tick by. We keep our watch through hands that move in circles.

And I just can't get over the idea that one day, just one day, I'm going to wake up with everything around me different and yet the same, and in that instant that it happens, in that very moment, I'm not even going to know it.