Ms Uncertainty Principles: SACRED WEEKEND

In American supermarkets there's so much everything.

Everything one needs and everything one doesn't need at all is laid out in an acre of displays with isle upon aisle of multiple versions of the same category of product. Look for Lettuce and you'll have fifty choices, for cheese, eggs or milk, you will be faced with daunting decision making. Having passed two homeless wanderers on the way to the store (one a teenager with her tiny dog in her lap was holding a crude cardboard sign stating "Anything Helps", the other a middle aged man wearing shabby military fatigues and torn sneakers was dozing in a patch of sun outside a bank), I noticed an old woman in the check out line leaning on her walker counting her change who, like me, had just a few items. All that 'everything' seemed obscene. I stumbled upon this poem by D.H. Lawrence:

There is nothing to save, now all is lost, but a tiny core of stillness in the heart like the eye of a violet.

A poem like "Nothing to Save" in 'Last Poems' suggests a little of what it was like for Lawrence during the last months of his life, feeling almost given up to illness and death and yet, somewhere, still miraculously alive. That was what living meant, to him."

Saturday
Holy Saturday commemorates the day that Jesus Christ lay in the tomb after his death according to the Christian bible, and on this day his "Blessed mother Mary as Our Lady of Sorrows is assigned the title Our Lady of Solitude, referring to her solace and grief at the death of her son", and while Jews say special additional prayer in the morning and Shabbat or Shabbos or the Sabbath ends after nightfall, I travelled across town to visit my friend Joanne at Dharma Mitra's Yoga Studio

and had a lovely moment with Dharma.

Sunday

Today Christians celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, while Jewish people celebrate Passover as a commemoration of their liberation by God from slavery in Egypt and their freedom as a nation under the leadership of Moses. It is also the day that children wait for the Easter bunny to arrive and deliver their treats of candy or painted eggs symbolic of rebirth. Most historians, including Biblical scholars, agree that Easter was originally a pagan festival. According to the New Unger’s Bible Dictionary says: “The word Easter is of Saxon origin; Eastra or Eostre is the Germanic goddess of spring, in whose honor sacrifices were offered each year."

(forty two minutes)