Lazarus

I celebrated my inaugural bike ride today, cycling along the trails and parkway to Pink Lake, in Gatineau Park.  With the temperature cradled in the teens, I rode comfortably in a pair of shorts, a tee shirt and a short-sleeved vest.  When I left home, I hadn't yet decided on my destination.  I thought of taking my normal circuit, up to Britannia and then around back through the Experimental Farm.  But as my legs unknotted and the tightness eased out of my chest, I felt the need for hills and trees.

For most of the way, I rode on clear paths and roads.  Once in the park, however, I began to hit patches of snow along the shadier parts of the route, including a couple of stretches just below Pink Lake at least a hundred meters long.  Going up, I had to dismount.  Coming down, I could carefully glide or peddle over the decaying crust.  The exercise routine of the past three months paid off for me, as I felt strong both going up and coming down.

Gatineau Park seemed on the verge of an explosion of life.  Neither the leaves nor spring wildflowers had yet emerged.  But I could sense them swelling -- could almost hear them, somewhere just below the sounds of water running everywhere.  Dripping from ice-rimed rock cuts, running in trickles down mossy slopes, in rivulets converging into streams that ran fast and noisy through ravines and valleys.  I saw little wildlife, except for foraging flocks of songbirds.  Large numbers of bohemian waxwings trilling in the treetops.  Black-capped chickadees buzzing and chittering as they hawked emerging moths and pulled tufts of punky wood and insects from rotten trees.  Even a robin bravely laying claim to his territory, from the top of young spruce in an old field -- whistling his bright song, as only the thrushes can do.

The contrast of the bare, grey tree branches with the sky and landscape always strikes me as particularly beautiful in the spring.  The intricate, fractal patterns of sugar maples and oaks climbing a rocky slope and displaying themselves in silhouette against the sky brings me to a halt in wonder.  The brilliant, feathered green of supercanopy white pines stands out clearly against the grey-black gneiss of the earth and its veneer of stark, decidous bones.

I've often thought of bare tree limbs as bones.  Particularly in the prairies in winter, where they seem to lift pleading hands to the frigid, remorseless blue or starry night.  Their desolation strikes me as both beautiful and frightening.

Coincidentally... or maybe not so... we read Ezekiel's vision of the valley of dry bones in church this morning, followed by John's account of the raising of Lazarus.  Death and resurrection:  spirit and body anew.  The promise of Easter and of spring.  I stood a long time at the Pink Lake lookout, and I felt deeply connected to the landscape about me.  I could feel and see myself only as an extension of the life surrounding me.  Not a apart from it; but a part of it.  And, yet, the only self-aware part of that life.  Somewhere in that reality lies the Holy Trinity.

I like the idea of heaven, but I've never seen the point of it.  We arise as an expression of life, and we return to life in time like a wave subsiding into the ocean.  In the end, I will welcome whatever God has in mind, but I'm not sure that I'd like to rise like Lazarus.  I'd rather give myself up to the earth and the trees, the sky and the stars.