Pesach, Eostre,
In so many of our spiritual narratives, this holiday celebrates the release from a winter of bondage or death, and new life. Martin Luther claimed that proof of the resurrection appeared every year--in the first leaves of the season.
I don't see my life changing dramatically this spring, although I know that the hardest changes are beyond our control. I am hoping that, within my home and my routines of family life and teaching and writing, I will be able to open myself to what has just begun growing. I hope I can recognize what is old and spiritually dead and cast it off (or bravely let it be stripped from me) so that a tender extension of new shoots may begin.
Nature is my great guide. I love the fact that the plants right now--bloodroot and trillium and tulips biting up blindly through cold earth--are both totally fragile and totally tenacious. And I love that all of our nourishment--of food and of color and healing--begins in these tiniest folds of stem and leaf, in a glowing green lit with some wondrous trust in life and life's continuance. It is a trust unbelievable to us, I think, or we would aspire more to the earth than we do. And yet it is the trust of transcendence, and it is our biological, human inheritance, imprinted in the folds of our own minds, our own cells.
Below is a tiny excerpt from my manuscript, Mary is River, which tells the Christian passion story from a female perspective--a renewed perspective, which I believe our spiritual stories continually need. I heard a wonderful quote the other day by midrash scholar Aviva Zornberg, who was featured on the NPR program, "Speaking of Faith." Myths are not myths because they never happened, she said, but because they happen all the time.
So many of us seem to grow by spiraling outward, like plants! I think that's why we need these ritual stories, and why we need to keep telling our versions of them.
More of Mary can be found on this blog, and I hope that the whole book will soon be available in print, or as a website.
Thank you for visiting.
I hope your spring is glorious--full of clear light,
and joy!
Rachel
From the last chapter of Mary is a River:
I know now the taste that comes from having slept through cycles of pain—
how the mouth wakes in the sealed skin of its own ignorance, tearing first in thirst, then chewing itself before any fruit.
And, at last, as water and as water’s song, I know the strange sense of having survived, faceless, nameless, diasporaed with light. I know what it is to blink in synchopated reflection,
in the sun’s innumerable multiplications, amid everything shimmering,
as if the world has become only the reflection of the world, a prismatic memory mirroring endlessly off the changing substance of itself.
In this, I have fished for modest, quick-slipping truths:
His hand sweeping across my cheek, eyes catching eyes.
The red, fisted faces of brothers hacking at recalcitrant land.
The sea-deep trust in the newborn’s eyes, and her mother
bending to her.
And always, the joy, the lamentation and bewilderment and joy
of having loved, of having been like anyone, and like no one else at all:
one who loved.
About Me
- Rachel Jamison Webster
- I grew up in the small town of Madison, Ohio, and now live in Evanston, IL, where I am an Artist in Residence (in poetry) at Northwestern University. I also edit the online anthology of international poetry, UniVerse, located at www.universeofpoetry.org. My poems have been published in many journals, including Poetry, The Southern Review, The Madison Review, Perihelion and blossombones, and I have won a few awards for my writing and teaching, including an Academy of American Poets' Young Poets Prize. For several years, I created and taught writing workshops for city teens, and in this capacity, co-edited two anthologies of writing by Chicago youth, Alchemy (2001) and Paper Atrium (2005). I have my MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. I am happy to give readings or workshops, and may be contacted at r-webster@northwestern.edu. Thank you for reading, and best wishes to you.
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