What I Learned From The Moon And A Flower About The Color Of Hope
Last Tuesday, as the country passed the grim milestone of the highest number of coronavirus deaths in a single day, I walked around grief-stricken. Then the moon rose.
It shone brighter and larger than it will on any other night this year, its color an extraordinary mix of persimmon and rose. Earlier in the day, my friend Paul Pynkoski sent me a photo from Canada of a tiny yellow wildflower inching its way out of dry soil.
“This small flower has been popping up at my brother’s house each spring for over 40 years,” Paul wrote. “I have no idea what it is, but it is the color of hope to me now.”
Tuesday’s brilliant “super moon” and that small persistent wildflower moved me to look beyond the current sadness.
True, the world is experiencing a dark, uncertain time, but the universe rolls on, doing what it does, which is lean into life.
Where I live in central Illinois, redbuds are popping out and lilac bushes are beginning to sprout green shoots. Jonquils shot up overnight, bowing their blossom heads like hooded monks at prayer. Violets peer out between blades of grass.
No one told them it was their time. No one controls their reappearance. It is as if amid so much human death, creation won’t stop giving birth.
Nature handed us these gifts as Christians and Jews celebrated some of the most sacred days of the year. My Jewish friends say it was a Passover unlike any they remember, with family joining the seder table not in person, but virtually online.
When they recalled the 10th plague that afflicted Egypt — the deaths of firstborn children — it was impossible not to think of the current pandemic. Unlike the ancient plague recounted in Exodus, this modern scourge doesn’t discriminate between young or old, Jew or Gentile, but is an equal opportunity slayer of innocents.
Prayers around the seder table recalling the Israelites’ liberation from slavery doubled this year as prayers for release from a different kind of bondage, one imposed on us by the virus.
Many Christian families experienced Holy Week as a personal Passion — with loved ones dying alone in hospital intensive care units, our contemporary Calvarys.
In the Passion story, women who loved Jesus come to bury him, and Joseph of Arimathea donates a freshly-hewn tomb. With coffins piling up at funeral homes, in churches and warehouses, who will come to bury our dead?
The moon and the spring flowers might seem indifferent to our questions in their silence. Still, by their presence they speak of hope.
With their unstoppable drive to just “be,” they point us toward a resurrection beyond the current suffering. “Slide your way past trouble,” William Stafford says in one of his poems.
We will likely remember Easter 2020 as a day of unusual quiet. That too is perhaps blessing. In his poem, “Keeping Quiet,” Pablo Neruda observes that sometimes only silence can “interrupt the sadness/ of never understanding ourselves.” He writes:
If we were not single-minded
about keeping our lives moving
and for once could do nothing
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt the sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.
Yes, when everything seems dead, and later proves alive. As the Easter season continues, may we look to the earth to teach us. May we seek signs of hope within nature. May we remember, like all of creation, to lean into life.
