You write like a historical epic from places unknown and known, it flows back and forward in front of my eyes for you, your world. I love your reading.so much passion in word and sentence; paragraph to page. On your stage of collage, pieces of you in all you do. Your work like runs for me to catch up, I catch you,rolling on a blanket when you are done.
I love that so often, when you approach a topic, you look at it from other angles that also make sense. Those peekings take us to new level of understanding today and yesterday and times that are "entirely uninterested in being named."
The Easter "peek" is that rebirth is key. IN ALL THINGS and that even gods and die and resurect.
Death has been a supposed mystery since one is old enough to think about life. We all face that final death but often do not realize that there are many that we expeerience in a lifetime and the many are of many different types, all significant.
So clealy stated: "This need is not difficult to understand. It offers a structure for enduring loss. It proposes that what withdraws is not gone. That absence is not always terminus. That what appears to conclude may be, in fact, in transit."
So obvious when closely looked at: "The ritual was designed to produce a genuine experience of dissolution: the temporary death of the self as it had been constituted, precisely because nothing new can be born into a space already fully occupied. The old form must vacate first."
And once again, you point out that so many of our beliefs, experiences, understanding are based on TRUTHS that are so old and from before we named it, before we even knew it still existed!
"Easter, then, is not primarily a celebration. It is a wager that human beings have been placing, in various forms, for as long as they have watched the year turn: A wager that what withdraws is not gone. That what is sealed is not finished. That beneath the surface of what appears concluded, something continues its quiet, invisible work.
These views, thank you Sara, help the concept of death a little easier to accept.
P.S. May I ask a question? Do you practice any one religion? With your DEEP views I can imagine it would be difficult to do. Or maybe easier because you can hold on to those beliefs you choose with a deeper understanding.
I love this. Myths truly are maps—they carry hidden truths within them. While writing Lost & Found and The Full Life, I immersed myself in many myths, including those of Aphrodite and Adonis. And I sense, deeply, that much more is yet to come, as these ancient stories continue to call me to retell them. 🙏
“What in you has already died but not yet been buried?
The stone at the entrance of the tomb is not always rolled away by angels. Sometimes it requires the full weight of a willingness to let what is dead be dead… so that what is trying to be born has somewhere to arrive.”
Deep and beautifully written essay. I have always loved the Sunday school version of Jesus but the apostles of early Christianity showed that, just as some mothers give birth to dead babes or kids with congenital deficiencies, they could give birth to a Jesus who was too weak to completely replace the Old Testament and its deity of violence and genocide.
So conventional believers absurdly try to embody both, resulting in the Holocaust and its rebirth in Gaza and all the tragedies of Christendom for the past 20.26 centuries.
I never imagined you were, but your essay describes how spiritual history is about human longing for relief from seasonal, societal and personal darkness. No doubt this is true but when you write: “Let what is dead be dead…so what is trying to be born has somewhere to arrive.” I have to note that the oppressive god of genocide is still going strong, after two thousand years. So humanity is probably not going to save itself by hoping for a nicer god to replace him.
Obviously we must continue to be the victims of our innate brutality and the gods and myths we create to explain, justify and perpetuate that brutality— until—
Until we recognise that our true enemies are our human propensity for greed, violence and the delusive power of language.
Cleary that recognition begins with rejecting the lies, myths and violence we see in our selves, our friends, and, as one poet wrote:
we must love our crooked neighbours with our crooked hearts.
What I wrote was not a call for a kinder god to take the place of a cruel one. It was a recognition that certain symbolic structures have exhausted their meaning, yet continue to operate as if they had not.
When I say “let what is dead be dead,” I am not speaking about belief, but about form. About the persistence of frameworks that no longer reveal anything, yet still demand obedience.
I agree that brutality, greed, and the distortions of language are not external enemies. They are human capacities. They do not disappear by changing myths.
But they also do not remain unchanged when the structures that justify them begin to collapse.
What interests me is not the replacement of one god with another, but the moment in which the old one no longer holds, and something unnamed begins to emerge in that space. Not necessarily better. Not necessarily safe. But no longer bound to the same symbolic authority.
Perhaps that is where recognition actually becomes possible, not as a moral decision, but as a structural shift in what we are able to see.
The idea that resurrection is not just something to believe in, but something people keep living through in different forms is brilliant. It feels thoughtful, intimate, and very alive. ☺️
You’re standing at a point where astronomy quietly dissolves into philosophy, and the Hindu imagination seems almost designed for this kind of threshold-thinking.
In the Hindu calendar, the equinox—Vishuva Sankranti—is not merely a celestial measurement but a lived recognition of balance: the sun crossing the equator as though the cosmos itself briefly remembers equilibrium before continuing its motion. It is not treated as an anomaly, but as a rhythm you are already inside of, where even stillness is only a temporary poise within movement.
What feels so resonant in your framing is how easily it aligns with the Hindu sense that renewal is never an exception, but a cadence. Time does not move in a straight line toward resolution; it breathes. Sṛṣṭi and pralaya, unfolding and withdrawal, are not opposites but alternating expressions of the same continuous intelligence of becoming.
So when you think of spring, or resurrection, or return, you are not really looking at something arriving after absence. You are witnessing prakriti shift its weight—turning inward and outward in cycles that never fully break, only reconfigure. Festivals like Chaitra Navratri or Holi sit in this same logic: not commemorations of a single past event, but reminders that dissolution is always already preparing the field for recomposition.
In that sense, the equinox is not something you observe from outside. It is something you are already participating in. A brief cosmic equilibrium that reveals a deeper truth: what you call endings are often just transitions you haven’t yet learned to recognize as movement continuing in another key.
You write like a historical epic from places unknown and known, it flows back and forward in front of my eyes for you, your world. I love your reading.so much passion in word and sentence; paragraph to page. On your stage of collage, pieces of you in all you do. Your work like runs for me to catch up, I catch you,rolling on a blanket when you are done.
I think I will never be done with writing :)
Sara,
I love that so often, when you approach a topic, you look at it from other angles that also make sense. Those peekings take us to new level of understanding today and yesterday and times that are "entirely uninterested in being named."
The Easter "peek" is that rebirth is key. IN ALL THINGS and that even gods and die and resurect.
Death has been a supposed mystery since one is old enough to think about life. We all face that final death but often do not realize that there are many that we expeerience in a lifetime and the many are of many different types, all significant.
So clealy stated: "This need is not difficult to understand. It offers a structure for enduring loss. It proposes that what withdraws is not gone. That absence is not always terminus. That what appears to conclude may be, in fact, in transit."
So obvious when closely looked at: "The ritual was designed to produce a genuine experience of dissolution: the temporary death of the self as it had been constituted, precisely because nothing new can be born into a space already fully occupied. The old form must vacate first."
And once again, you point out that so many of our beliefs, experiences, understanding are based on TRUTHS that are so old and from before we named it, before we even knew it still existed!
"Easter, then, is not primarily a celebration. It is a wager that human beings have been placing, in various forms, for as long as they have watched the year turn: A wager that what withdraws is not gone. That what is sealed is not finished. That beneath the surface of what appears concluded, something continues its quiet, invisible work.
These views, thank you Sara, help the concept of death a little easier to accept.
P.S. May I ask a question? Do you practice any one religion? With your DEEP views I can imagine it would be difficult to do. Or maybe easier because you can hold on to those beliefs you choose with a deeper understanding.
Fondly,
Michael
I love this. Myths truly are maps—they carry hidden truths within them. While writing Lost & Found and The Full Life, I immersed myself in many myths, including those of Aphrodite and Adonis. And I sense, deeply, that much more is yet to come, as these ancient stories continue to call me to retell them. 🙏
I see myself wrapped by them also. Is a wonderful area to study.
“What in you has already died but not yet been buried?
The stone at the entrance of the tomb is not always rolled away by angels. Sometimes it requires the full weight of a willingness to let what is dead be dead… so that what is trying to be born has somewhere to arrive.”
Deep and beautifully written essay. I have always loved the Sunday school version of Jesus but the apostles of early Christianity showed that, just as some mothers give birth to dead babes or kids with congenital deficiencies, they could give birth to a Jesus who was too weak to completely replace the Old Testament and its deity of violence and genocide.
So conventional believers absurdly try to embody both, resulting in the Holocaust and its rebirth in Gaza and all the tragedies of Christendom for the past 20.26 centuries.
I am not a conventional believer... :)
I never imagined you were, but your essay describes how spiritual history is about human longing for relief from seasonal, societal and personal darkness. No doubt this is true but when you write: “Let what is dead be dead…so what is trying to be born has somewhere to arrive.” I have to note that the oppressive god of genocide is still going strong, after two thousand years. So humanity is probably not going to save itself by hoping for a nicer god to replace him.
Obviously we must continue to be the victims of our innate brutality and the gods and myths we create to explain, justify and perpetuate that brutality— until—
Until we recognise that our true enemies are our human propensity for greed, violence and the delusive power of language.
Cleary that recognition begins with rejecting the lies, myths and violence we see in our selves, our friends, and, as one poet wrote:
we must love our crooked neighbours with our crooked hearts.
What I wrote was not a call for a kinder god to take the place of a cruel one. It was a recognition that certain symbolic structures have exhausted their meaning, yet continue to operate as if they had not.
When I say “let what is dead be dead,” I am not speaking about belief, but about form. About the persistence of frameworks that no longer reveal anything, yet still demand obedience.
I agree that brutality, greed, and the distortions of language are not external enemies. They are human capacities. They do not disappear by changing myths.
But they also do not remain unchanged when the structures that justify them begin to collapse.
What interests me is not the replacement of one god with another, but the moment in which the old one no longer holds, and something unnamed begins to emerge in that space. Not necessarily better. Not necessarily safe. But no longer bound to the same symbolic authority.
Perhaps that is where recognition actually becomes possible, not as a moral decision, but as a structural shift in what we are able to see.
The idea that resurrection is not just something to believe in, but something people keep living through in different forms is brilliant. It feels thoughtful, intimate, and very alive. ☺️
Brilliant analysis from an interesting perspective 🙏🏼
You’re standing at a point where astronomy quietly dissolves into philosophy, and the Hindu imagination seems almost designed for this kind of threshold-thinking.
In the Hindu calendar, the equinox—Vishuva Sankranti—is not merely a celestial measurement but a lived recognition of balance: the sun crossing the equator as though the cosmos itself briefly remembers equilibrium before continuing its motion. It is not treated as an anomaly, but as a rhythm you are already inside of, where even stillness is only a temporary poise within movement.
What feels so resonant in your framing is how easily it aligns with the Hindu sense that renewal is never an exception, but a cadence. Time does not move in a straight line toward resolution; it breathes. Sṛṣṭi and pralaya, unfolding and withdrawal, are not opposites but alternating expressions of the same continuous intelligence of becoming.
So when you think of spring, or resurrection, or return, you are not really looking at something arriving after absence. You are witnessing prakriti shift its weight—turning inward and outward in cycles that never fully break, only reconfigure. Festivals like Chaitra Navratri or Holi sit in this same logic: not commemorations of a single past event, but reminders that dissolution is always already preparing the field for recomposition.
In that sense, the equinox is not something you observe from outside. It is something you are already participating in. A brief cosmic equilibrium that reveals a deeper truth: what you call endings are often just transitions you haven’t yet learned to recognize as movement continuing in another key.