Rebirth and Renewal: Rites of Spring

The round eggs of Spring, unbroken spheres with no beginning or end were everywhere this week. Last Sunday, we made felt birds nest and filled them with colored eggs with our friends Mara and Orelia in Queens. We have been making nests and eggs, all year, as my boy is obsessed with dinosaurs and their habitats. We have paper maiche eggs and hollowed out ostrich eggs as our everyday decor. Feathers decorate the dust bunnies that hide under our couch.

For me, the religious holidays that happen around this time herald the beginning of spring when we begin to emerge from our winter wool and face the world with a new excitement for living and sharing our ideas. I recently finished two big projects and took part in a healing circle with 7 other women artists, so I have been really enjoying the pause between seasons, between projects, the gestating of new idea eggs to come.

Our school vacation week began and ended with a spiritual ceremony. On Monday, we joined friends for their Passover Seder. A seder is a beautiful ritual that takes place around a dinner table where food, wine and storytelling are in abundance. A religious or cultural ceremony that promotes individual and community storytelling is so important to spiritual and creative development and deepens an individual's sense of identity. Each family has their own ways of marking this celebration of Jewishness and of freedom, from retelling family tales of survival while recounting epic biblical feats as well as advocating ways to combat injustice in our world today. When I told my four year old about the plagues reigned down upon the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh who would not free his slaves, he was rapt at the gory violence of it all - the river of blood! the boils! the lice! the locusts! Passover had extra resonance this season considering the recent uprising in Cairo and throughout the Muslim world which has the potential to create a new world order in the Middle East once again.

During our week off, Easter gifts arrived daily in the mail from relatives on both coasts. We met friends and visited several museums, another sort of church for sure. We checked out the Met and drew dinosaurs in our sketchbook surrounded as we were by Greek gods and then went to the Guggenheim where we noticed our favorite Chagall painting had the initials AAB on it, which are the initials of our own patriarch in residence. The next day, we visited The Intrepid Museum, a museum of the great machines of war, a battleship filled with fighter planes and helicopters. In a way, it is an anti-museum, a temple to destruction, instead of creation, a tribute to the military industrial complex and all of its dark gray and black monster machines. The day before Easter inspired by all the works of art we had seen all week, we had a beautiful morning, painting and crayoning on a tarp on the floor.

For Easter breakfast, we cracked eggs and made spinach and dill omelets, followed by a dessert of a beautiful chocolate Jaques Torres egg. At 2pm we attended The Sacred Center in New York City on the Upper West Side. It is a new thought interfaith center which means it takes from many different ancient philosophies and promotes the divinity in all human beings. The gospel choir was amazing and the ministers often spoke the words of the song with the singers behind them, a truly theatrical and engaging performance the underscored the idea of song as prayer. The congregants were dancing and swaying in our seats which definitely raised the joy level in the room. There was also a ten minute meditation in the middle of the service which was really powerful as well. Mannix painted yet another egg with the other kids and brought it home.

In her Easter sermon, the Reverend Jane Galloway spoke about channeling and the thin veil that exists between this world and the next during moments of crisis or major life moments such as birth and death. She mentioned that we are all channelers to the level that we accept the belief of the gift that comes with it. The Sacred Center is a community of artists and she spoke about the channeling that happens when we are in a creative zone working on a project and time just disappears. I recently watched a great TED talk by Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert in which she spoke about channeling through writing allowing her co-creators, her spiritual daemons to speak through her.

We shared the service with our friend, Marie-Louise, a musician who travels with a magic fiddle that has been in her family for centuries, and hung out at Riverside Park afterward. All in all, it was the nicest Easter-Passover Holy Week, filled with new experiences, family, friends, good conversations, thoughtful moments, and a general sense of peace and joie de vivre.