fragile spring

Easter is approaching. Some years I celebrate spring on the Equinox, and some years on Easter. For over ten years now this celebration has entailed going up to the land I bought way back with my then coven sisters. Spring is stupendous there, daffodils and wild iris everywhere, the earth erupting in beauty. My friend Anne always comes up with her children, and I sit on the deck of the decaying cabin we call “the cookhouse” and make psyanky eggs and eventually we have big egg hunt and build a beautiful altar to Easter, the goddess of spring.

I’ve been making psyanky eggs since I was 13. They are traditional since pre- Christian times in the Ukraine. Using a mini batik type tool, you paint the egg with beeswax and using the method of wax resist, you keep painting symbols of rebirth on the egg and dipping it in different colors, until finally you gently hold it near a candle flame and melt the wax off. Ukrainian women made these over the winter and early spring, and then used them magically all thru the year. For almost every type of human endeavor, there was an egg that could assist. Given at weddings, births, and funerals, psyanky eggs are symbols of the regenerative powers of life, and also remind us of life’s strength and fragility.

This year, for the first time that I can remember, I have no impetus to get myself and my son up to my land, and no desire to create psyanky. The constant rain certainly makes a weekend in the country lose appeal. But even without the rain, I know my heart just isn’t up to it.

Last year when I came home from our weekend of psyanky making, I learned that my lover’s brother had hung himself from the tree in the backyard of their childhood family home. He was found soon after I had left for the country. My lover had not gone with me, as she wanted to go to her mother’s for Easter. My land does not have a phone and its remoteness challenges every cell phone it has encountered. While she was in the shock and horror of grief, I had been making her an egg to invoke joy.

I drove down to be with her and her family, bringing with me a basket of my psyanky eggs. I fed the family, and I went to the backyard and put some of the eggs in the tree. Some of the eggs also ended up in David’s coffin a few days later, when we gathered at the family viewing of his body.

That week I time traveled more than once back to my father’s suicide twenty some years ago. Strangely, the tree my father climbed was just a few miles from my lover’s childhood home. The quality of light, the feel of the air, the smell of that valley, all took me back in time. And the peculiar mix of grief, confusion, guilt, and anger that flows thru a family who has just lost someone to suicide.

Something was lost by me not being there for the woman I loved in those first few days after David’s death. There were cracks and fractures between us well before, but nothing could have prepared me for the gulf that happened in the ensuing weeks. Despite the cracks in our relationship, the tender fierceness of my love for her gave me the sense we would always endure. I was wrong. It was hard that I hadn’t been there. It seemed to be harder yet that I could be there, that I did understand. Within a month, she had broken up with me and was involved with another woman. Over this past year she has been emotionally careening, and has many times sideswiped me in her pain and confusion. The last time she came close was a direct hit and run, so devastating that at this point I can no longer have her in my life. Like David and my father, she is has made herself dead to me. This is incredibly challenging for someone with Venus in Capricorn. I don’t like to let go, to give up, to walk away from those I love. It is not my nature.

In a few days, it will be Easter, the day of resurrection, of redemption. I know that I eventually will find it in me to change our house altar, to move from the time of Brigid to full blown spring. I’m hoping I can find it in me by Beltane to do at least one psyanky egg, to hold the fragility of the plain white egg between my fingers and transform it into something beautiful and unique. This year, this will truly be an act of magic.