The First Sunday After the First Full Moon

Resurrecting to experience after expectation

Last year, it snowed through May here in the Wood River Valley of Idaho. This year, before March has even ended, most of the snow has already melted. The studs on my winter tires have been grinding against the pavement for weeks. It’s time to take them off, to return to smooth rubber and fairer weather.

I’ve been hesitant. I really dislike cold weather. And this winter, I’ve been very nearly disastrously stuck in a rut of snow or mud several times. Every time makes me more nervous of the next possibility. That fear becomes its own black hole, centrifugally holding me back. Today, I need to accept that Spring really has begun and shake off the cobwebs of the past.

all photos my own

Life is like this, yes? Sometimes winter - real or metaphorical - is awful and seems to never end. Other times, it is surprisingly not bad at all. Our expectation rather than our experience holds us back and makes things much harder. Our expectation can make us unhappy while our experience can be incredibly freeing.  

Rob Brezny said something in his Substack this week that stopped me in my tracks.

I'm reminded of Jung's formula, which is that we don't so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.

Hah! So true! Too often we hold onto an old narrative, a problem that is, in truth, no longer a problem, and fail to realize the season has changed, we have changed.

And here comes the personal illustration which I’m always loathe to share yet is undeniably on point:

I’ve been living with Tom for six months now. After an eighteen-year relationship, spent more apart than together, we married last July. Then suddenly and very unexpectedly, contrary to everything I would have told you when we married, I decided to return to Idaho and create a home with him. In a blink of an eye (two months to be exact), I turned my life upside down.

I left Tulsa, which I honestly still dearly miss. I miss my friends there as well as the town, my favorite parks, the weather, my old home-even with its mold problems and crumbling concrete steps—I miss my life. A life I really loved. A life I had created and worked hard for, a life of enjoying not being partnered.

After decades of struggling to embrace my life as a single woman, finally truly deeply happy to be—and choosing to be—without a beau or significant other, I was resistant to give it up. Even as I physically made the transition, knowing beyond a doubt it was the right thing to be doing, my fate so to speak, emotionally I was still holding on to who I was, because I genuinely liked who I was. I was proud of that woman. I had earned being that person. Whereas this person, a married woman in her fifties, this person was foreign to me. I didn’t know what to expect. And not knowing made me vaguely apprehensive.

It's possible to hold two contrasting truths at the same time. I miss Tulsa and my life there and I am happy here living in Idaho with Tom, married. I’m happier than I expected to be. The shift has been not just so much easier than I could have imagined, it has been, very simply, easy. Relinquishing my solitude and sharing my space, my daily hours, my bed, and my bathroom (previously possessively private spaces for me), and everything else has actually been smooth, without any of the angst or agitation I expected. More than that, I am relaxed, soft, contented. Not only was this unexpected, I think perhaps I didn’t think it would be fair to feel this way. That somehow feeling this way would be a betrayal to others who don’t have this current state of grace. – I’m still unpacking that, so forgive me if it doesn’t make sense, but it would be dishonest if I edited it out.—

So here we are, on the eve of the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox: the eve of Easter. I’m thinking about Persephone, snakes shedding their skins, renewal, new life, and resurrections.

A very dear friend is getting married today. It is a small gathering of primarily family in Wisconsin, so I won’t be there, but her nuptials have me excited. Like me, she was happily single for a very long time. She was content long before I was and has been a bit of a mentor for me in this regard. And now, today, she will embrace a new life, a new possibility. Today she and her betrothed will declare a new joy, committing to a future shared in love.

Isn’t this a fitting reflection of the holiday? Resurrecting to a new way of being. Being present to a new experience and leaving behind an old, outdated, no longer useful expectation.

Another reminder from Rob Brezny:

The water you drink is three billion years old, give or take five million years. The stuff your body is made of is at least 10 billion years old, probably older, and has been as  far away as 100,000 light-years from where it is right now. 

The air you breathe has, in the course of its travels, been literally everywhere on the planet, and has slipped in and out of the lungs of almost every human being who has ever lived.

Yet every breath you take is, in that moment, new. Every sip of water is cleansing.

This Easter may you know this to be true. This Easter, may you feel yourself renewed. This Easter, may you release your expectations and revel in a new experience.  In the words of Wendell Berry, Practice Resurrection.