During this part of my life, it’s not uncommon for me to die. There are quite a few days where I die. I don’t mean that I officially die, and now here I am — boo — writing to you from the beyond. What I mean is that the spirit to live may leave me, and that is a very real kind of death itself.
As a result of all of my deaths, Easter is a holiday that means a lot — perhaps everything, in a sense — to me, and I look at every day as a form of Easter.
When I was a kid, me and my sisters would be trundled off to church, and we’d hear a story about a guy who’d been nailed to a cross, died, was stuck in a cave that was also a tomb with a rock jammed into the entrance and then out he came a few days later saying, “Still here, baby.”
I’m being a little flippant, but I prefer to call it informal and human. The wiser one gets, the more one seems to understand that so much of the value of religion is metaphorical and how those metaphors might assist us in gleaning insight and actuating that insight with our own lives. It doesn’t matter if someone came back to life in the literal sense — what matters is that we do some version of being reborn every day.
A new day, no matter what your life is like, is a beautiful thing. If you have the best life or the worst. At present, things can always change. A life filled with love or with loneliness. A new day is a chance to do and be better than you’ve ever been before.
Isn’t that a glorious concept? Unfortunately, not many people look at life that way. But what if you did? The Easter egg is itself a great concept. Your little ones are underfoot hunting for these treasures, their laughter filling the spaces of the morning, but the Easter egg has also gained cultural cachet that we can extrapolate to our lives.
We buy a Blu-ray box set, we read online of the Easter eggs — the hidden away bonus bits — but do we not all have our own Easter eggs inside of us? The parts that we discover and crack open wide.
Crack those personal Easter eggs open and light comes out. That’s Easter. That’s a life well lived. There is so much darkness in the world. Light is often a mirage. People utilize a form of faux-light as a disguise for the procurement of often ill-gotten advantages and rewards.
But what you can do — and this goes back to the metaphor of the leaving of the cave — is take your light around with you. Light has this marvelous way of providing illumination for others in need of it. That’s what I’m trying to do here with you, for I am surrounded by much darkness, but I am light.
What does the darkness of my cave look like? I’m in a very clannish industry, where one who achieves on their own, legitimately, without being a member of a sinecure, tends to be hated, envied, feared, locked out.
The more I achieve, the harder everything gets. I have a blog that, at three million words, is the longest sustained work of literature in history, documenting what I’ve come to realize is a daily form of Easter. It’s a journal of rebirth. The Easterization of the self. The finding and spreading of light.
Here’s what it may look like when I die. It’ll be, say, a Sunday, and I’ll be standing in the back hall of my building, head pressed against the glass of the door, crying. I won’t wish to go on. I see no hope. I don’t know how to get through the rest of the day. I despair that nothing will ever change. I have no agency, no say-so.
And so I die. I’m dead then. I accept that I am dead. I don’t fight it. The rock is against the mouth of the cave. But I also know that tomorrow will come, and I’ll start again. I will rise. This day will be over. This death will be done.
I have the opportunity to find life and light within myself. This is the pertinent resurrection. Life is Easter. Not just some day in the early spring.
Crack open all of your Easter eggs and don’t stop searching for them just because you think they’ve all been gathered. And just because you die one day, don’t let it stop you from living tomorrow.
Fleming is a writer.
