Spring has finally sprung here in the coastal mountains of California. Pollen is dusting decks, cars, and the window of my bedroom. The plum trees in the back yard are decked out in white for a dance in the vernal breezes. All around renewal is showing itself in chittering chickadees and swarming hives of bees. This time each year I find my personal equator pointing directly at the sun, one foot in winter, the other, confidently in spring. Another season, another resurrection.
I don’t know where humans came upon the idea that gods could die and be reborn, but it is impossible to stand in front of a brave little Crocus pushing up between winter’s detritus of leaves and dirt and not see a bit of light born all over again. The shared experience of death and rebirth is so pervasive Carl Jung thought of it as an archetype —part of the collective unconsciousness of humans. Resurrection then is not a miracle, it is instead part of the natural order, resting safely within a standard, healthy, human process. Dying and being born again is common as dirt.
High school biology teaches that a living thing is born, grows, takes in energy, excretes, and reproduces. To the list I would add: a living thing dies multiple times. Indeed, a life well lived is multiple lives well lived. Here on the cusp of spring, I wonder over my own winters and all the routine deaths that brought me to the present moment.
I might have a unique and personal vantage point on death and resurrection. When I was 18, an internal bleeding incident took me to the point of being “clinically” dead for about a minute or so. I distinctly remember lying in a gurney and watching a heart monitor attached to my chest flatline before I blacked out. No, there were no bright lights, tunnels or long-dead relatives beckoning me anywhere. For me, the out of body experiences I have had all came later without any hospital drama or intensive care. My near death that day left me with an abiding understanding of how normal death and living in fact are. It was the first time I died that I could remember, but it was not my last.
There was this one time much later when I was having a particularly hard time dying, and I was miserable with the pain of it. It was late spring. The snow had melted back, and the sun was staying on the long side of the day, so I decided to go for a walk. Just a simple stroll down the road and back, nowhere special. There was an aspen at a bend in the street, holding onto a small berm above a lively stream full of the winter runoff. The afternoon was perfectly still and yet… the tree was shaking so beautifully I could not but stop and stare and die to myself there in the hiss and flash of green. That was another time I remember dying.
Of course, there were other times, all shared human experiences. Being fired from a job. Betrayal. Watching children leave home. Giving up on a cherished ideal. Seeing myself as someone else saw me. Accepting almost anything outside my plan with equanimity. All deaths. Sometimes, just the simple act of breathing and staying there has been a death.
But, but, but… it was never an end. In the dark, something bound up was waiting for an aspen, a crocus or a friendly word from a loved one to call me out into the sunshine. I am Lazarus every day. Aren’t we all?