And It's Not Even Good Friday Yet!

I haven't taken one picture today. I suppose I could go outside right now and find something pretty or interesting or even wander around the house and do some sort of shot of a mantel piece with little treasures on it or something that's meaningful to me but I just don't have the energy. 
Plus- who cares? 
Today has been as beautiful as the past few days before it. Not quite as cool but still as pacific as a clear lake on a windless day. I spent part of it in town, meeting up with Lily and Lauren and Jessie and Levon. Jessie is feeling better and she sent August back to school today. Levon doesn't go to his school on Tuesdays and Thursdays so he was our little tag-along. We met up at Costco and the ladies and I made decisions about Easter dinner which can basically be summed up by the words ham and cheese. 
Oh, there will be more than that but those are the things we bought today. Lauren is going to bring her delicious sweet potatoes, Lily is going to make the sounds-horrible-but-is-delicious pineapple casserole. I'm going to cook collard greens and angel biscuits. Maybe a lemon cake with berries. Probably. I think May is going to make a salad, Rachel some macaroni and cheese. 
It will be fabulous. 

For whatever reason I have just felt so flat today. Somehow, emotionally exhausted. Perhaps. Although I have no idea what it is that might be exhausting me. Losing my little hen? Trying to deal in my mind with the Wetlands Dollar General? The prospect of yet another Easter on this earth? 
Don't get me wrong- I love our Easter dinners. I love Easter baskets and dyed eggs and children searching for them. I love ham far more than is appropriate. I love celebrating new life and I even love the idea of ladies dressing up for church on Easter Sunday, especially the ladies who wear magnificent hats. In a way, I think I have even moved a step beyond being outraged by the Christian outlook on Easter, the celebration of their personal god being resurrected to somehow save us from our sins but not really because you still have to believe and worship and all that other stuff for your own personal salvation to really take hold. 
I guess I'm still a little outraged. 
So much energy expended in this ghoulish belief. So many lives directed by the rules made up by men which are somehow entangled with and informed by this Jewish rabbi who may or may not have actually existed, who most certainly did not rise from the dead any more than his mother was impregnated by the holy spirit. 
You know that I have always said that some of us got the religion gene and some of us did not and the older I get, the more I believe that. Some people just have an unrelenting need to believe in something mystical and magical which has vast power in the universe and which personally cares for and loves them and hears their prayers no matter the complete lack of evidence that such a being or force exists. 

Ay-yi. 

I look out into my backyard which is not the most beautiful place in the world but certainly a place I love with all of the green of leaves and the call of birds and the branch-framed windows of sky and I think of places that are incredibly and exceptionally and gloriously beautiful like majestic waterfalls and sunsets over oceans and the forests of giant redwoods and I think of newborn babies and the way their eyes open to their new world and find the eyes of their mothers and fathers and the direct current of love that flows between them and I think of seeds busting through the dirt with their own newborn leaves, reaching for the sun, and I think of eggs in their perfection and I think of the love of people for each other and the kindness of strangers and the unbelievable gift of music and of all the arts and I know that many people would point to all of these things and say, "There. Proof of God." 
But for me, the explanations of science are more than enough and do not deter me from calling any of these things miracles or holy because it is the way things have evolved and the way we have evolved to be drawn to them. It is the way it is because...it is the way it is! 
And if you give an all-powerful god the credit for the majestic and the amazing, you also have to give that god the credit for disease and poverty and suffering and cruelty that are as present in our world as the good things. If not more so.

Well. That's what I think. 

Love...Ms. Moon