Death and resurrection

You don't need to be a Christian to appreciate the symbolism of Easter. In the northern hemisphere, you can see it in nature all around you: it is a time when the cycles of death and resurrection are merging. Winter is being overtaken, in fits and starts, by spring. The earth and branches, seemingly dead these past months, reveal that the life you had forgotten lay beneath and within them the whole time. You can see it in the sparrows nesting in the eaves of your house, bringing dry dead straw and grass piece by piece to build their nests, in which new life will soon hatch. In the ducks and geese stopping over in coastal areas on their way north. In the knowledge that the songbirds will soon arrive, that they are inching your way each night, following the stars.

And perhaps you see the pattern in your own life, too. Perhaps you know that something needs to die, be left behind, so that out of it fresh life will spring.