Saturday, March 31, 2012

Here Comes Peter Cottontail

As I scour blogs looking for spring time and Easter activities to do with the kids, I am reminded what this season is about for me personally, and no, it's not some fantastical story of a man rising from the dead two thousand years ago. But it is very much about rebirth.

We spend a lot of time in the woods, especially this time of year when the temperature is pleasant and the thorns and brush are not so grown up that they make walking through difficult. There we spot toads freshly emerged from the cool ground, ready to find other toads and get their hop on, their skin dark and wet and their movement still slow. We step over fallen trees, whose fall made room for the abundance of saplings striving to be the one to crowd out its neighbors (siblings?) first. Evolution is on display everywhere. Undeniable.

Closer to the house, we've watched daily for the appearance of the first fence post lizards on our concrete steps. (They crawled out of the ground about a week ago.)  In a few more weeks, the first tiny babies will have hatched, and we'll watch them grow all summer. Between now and late fall, on almost any sunny day, they'll be hanging out catching ants and other little bugs just outside our south-facing windows.

A car ride anywhere right now includes us passing fields with brand-spanking new baby calves, their legs wobbly, some of them with fur still wet from birth. I hope I never stop being as excited as my kids to see them each spring.

With all of this, I have no need for some make believe heaven in the sky. Heaven is here, with my family, in this little spot on earth. It's in the red bud trees, soon indistinguishable from every other tree on the treeline, but now a gorgeous deep purple that I can never get used to, no matter how many springtimes in Kentucky I've had. I'm so incredibly lucky to be part of this beautiful, abundant natural world and the rebirth it offers over and over again. It is everything to me. And it is enough.

Chocolate bunnies and marshmallow peeps are just a bonus.

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