Easter celebrates spring, the season of renewal.
Here in Philadelphia where I live, the landscape has dramatically changed in the past week or two. It seems every day I see new flowers, new blossoms on the trees.
What a contrast to the dried out winter browns of just a couple weeks ago.
Back in late February I started to get hit up by people looking for work cutting lawns. Cutting the lawn? Ha! Back then thinking of spring and growing grass was the farthest thing from my mind.
My poor excuse for a garden looked very sad with the skeletons of last summer's blooming plants standing guard. I had planted perennials. I was advised that I should leave a foot or two between plants because they would grow in in subsequent years. Believing that they would seemed more like an act of faith than anything else.
The grass itself looked sad in its scraggly brown. The tree, planted on a windy, bitter November day stood naked in the winter cold. The container plants, the ones I hadn't taken indoors looked scrawny. It was hard to believe that masses of yellow Coreopsis flowers bloomed last July or asters bloomed in September.
But this past Monday, daffodils peeked out on the lawn in front of my accountant's house. And grass had turned a vibrant green, the shade of green one only sees in April when the grass shows its young vital self.
The color, the growth buoys my mood. It shows the perennial nature of cycles. That which lay dormant will arise yet again. Nature is rewarding us for toughing out the winter. And as we all experience times of winter in our souls, we can learn by observing Nature's cycles.
To me, that is the meaning of the spring holidays such as Easter.
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