What a wonderful spring it's been! I could not be happier with the weather, my neighborhood, or the miraculous way things have unfolded, both in the garden and in my life. My pea plants have been emerging, poking through the soil beneath their little make-shift cloches cut from salvaged two-liter bottles. Their neighbors the carrots -- at least, I think they're carrots -- are popping up, along with some kale seedlings, while indoors, everything under the grow lights is absolutely -thriving- ... except the lungwort and shiso, but I'm trying not to give up on them yet. I just transplanted some of the kale and lettuce I started inside into their own pots, and divided the tomatoes. It's always hard to decide which seedlings are the fittest and which ones get pinched. It makes me feel guilty, snuffing out that little baby plant life when it struggled so hard to pop out of that seed! I've been saving some of the best seedlings I had to pinch, pressed between the pages of my giant copy of "Guide to Country Living." I'm hoping to make a great gardening journal to document all of my experiments and then I'll glue some of those failed seedlings inside.
So if the recent explosive popularity of fantasy and comic book-inspired movies is any indication, I'm not the only one craving a little magic in this era where dealers of technology are constantly waving the latest imagination-crushing gadget in our face, trying to tempt us with promises that we can "watch YouTube on a horse." Man. If I have anything you could call a religion, I can safely say that watching YouTube on a horse, while riding on a beautiful beach for God's Sake, would be a mortal sin. But anyway, in this world of iThis and Twitter-that, I find it nice to practice the old rituals that our ancestors have observed for thousands of years. Ostara is one of my favorites. Falling on the Spring Equinox, it's a fertility festival in the purest sense, a celebration of the returning light in which the dark half of the year gives way to the time of planting and growth. In pre-Christian times, the ancient Europeans would celebrate the rebirth of the sun god, who dies every year at the end of the harvest season only to be born again with the return of Spring. It's probably more than just a happy coincidence that the sun god of Ostara (which should be sounding a lot like "Easter" to you by now, both in name and tone) should happen to share a rebirthday with Jesus Christ; after all, it's a good time of the year to be reborn. We are reminded that just as the Earth itself "dies" in winter and is "reborn" in the spring, birth and death are not permanent conditions but merely part of a larger continuum that we can't completely understand. My favorite Buddhist author, Thich Nhat Hanh, comes close to describing the mystery in his typically simple/beautiful fashion:
"One day as I was about to step on a dry leaf, I saw the leaf in the ultimate dimension. I saw that it was not really dead, but it was merging with the moist soil and preparing to appear on the tree the following spring in another form. I smiled at the leaf and said, 'You are pretending.'"
This past weekend, we celebrated the Easter side of things at Travis' parents' house in South Dakota. There was a delicious strawberry-spinach salad and the best damn veggie korma I've ever made, followed by a surprise marriage proposal! It was a surprise even for me (Yes -- I was the one who did the asking!) at Rumors, in Madison, while Travis' friends' band, The Coltcockers, were playing. Many of Travis' friends were in attendance, back in their hometown to celebrate the holiday, and the mood just seemed strangely perfect. I yelled, "We should get married!" over the music, and Travis responded with something to the effect of, "There's a microphone right there. Why don't you ask me for real?" And the next thing I knew, I was on the stage, asking him, blurting out something in front of everyone about how much I loved him blah blah blah... I don't remember the details because I was pretty much overcome with a deep and terrifying sense of, "Oh God, what am I doing!?" But he said yes. And even though it wasn't planned, it didn't involve a trip to any exotic destination or even a ring, I feel like it was very much in keeping with how we like to live (spontaneously) and how much we love our friends and our family.
We're engaged! And not very photogenic, apparently.
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