Calmly Plotting Resurrection

The bulbs outside my kitchen window are blooming. Grateful for springtime.

It is not the right time to plant daffodils, they say.

Daffodils are a fall planted bulb.

Except right now, my daffodils are blooming, and I can see exactly where it would be nice to have more. I planted 100 bulbs last fall, and they are beautiful now, but there are a few gaping holes in my daffodil canvas, empty spaces that long to be filled .

So I went online this morning, searching Google for the best place to buy more bulbs. And as I drifted through different websites, thinking about how fun it would be to add pink daffodils to my yard (who even knew that they had pink daffodils?), a shadow suddenly passed over me, and a question: does it matter? Will this place even make it through another year? Fire season is coming. California is in drought.  Not to mention this whole global climate change thing. Putin is threatening to do unspeakable things to win this war in Ukraine. The threat of nuclear war looms larger than ever.

(Rob Bell, one of my best-loved teachers, just released a podcast where he shared that the United States has more than 5500 nuclear weapons. Russia has more than 6000. Experts say that it would most likely take just 100 of those bombs going off to make life on earth untenable. Only 100. So why do we have thousands of these? Where is the sense in that?)

All the while, the birds are at my feeders, including a family of doves, who make my days brighter with their cooing. The perennials are emerging from their winter hibernation. The bears are waking up. My son and I saw our first coyote ever in our front yard the other day. The native Bleeding Hearts that I transplanted from my parents’ house last year are bursting out and looking healthy. I had to baby them a lot last summer. I think they are going to make it.

I was thinking about E.B White the other day, and one of my favorite stories from him, about his wife Katharine, an avid gardener, who knew she was dying, but who went out in their yard with her bulb chart to plant bulbs one year like she did every autumn, even though she knew she would not live to see them bloom.

White wrote, “There was something comical yet touching in her bedraggled appearance… her studied absorption in the implausible notion that there would be yet another spring, oblivious to the ending of her own days, which she knew perfectly well was near at hand, sitting there with her detailed chart under those dark skies in dying October, calmly plotting the resurrection.”

That is one of the best lines ever: “calming plotting the resurrection.” A little wordy for a tattoo, but the sentiment would be a good one.

What would it mean to be a calm resurrection plotter?

Unfortunately? You can’t get to resurrection without death first.

(I am so not a fan of this system. Whose idea was it anyway?)

The seasons remind us of this ancient truth, an inescapable one. First comes death, then resurrection. As Richard Rohr, one of my favorite teachers, says, “Christians are helped by the fact that Jesus literally submitted to this pattern and came out more than okay. The pattern of transformation is always death transformed, not death avoided.” So while death surely seems like it’s winning these days, we can trust that there’s a bigger plan at work. Or at least we can try to trust. We can rest in resurrection: for all the things we love, including our planet.

So I will plant the bulbs, and if the world disappears tomorrow in a cloud of ash and smoke, I have hope that it will right itself again someday. In a few billion years, perhaps. All of this came into being without us (and it seemed to function better without us, actually): our hearts, our lungs, the dogwoods, the hawks, this wondrous place. And what lies on the other side of these days for us? After our hearts beat a final time here? Nobody knows. But I hope for resurrection. The daffodils emerging every year from those tiny, shriveled bulbs help me believe.

So I will order and plant the bulbs. And continue to feed the birds, change the water in the birdbath, tackle the nonnative blackberries. I will be startled and thrilled by the sight of a coyote in the front yard on an ordinary school day morning. I will stay close in, and listen to my people, and try to listen to the people who are not yet my people. Widen the circle. Hold hands. Live these days, as best I can, in hope: calmly plotting the resurrection.