Today is my birthday. It is early but already several have greeted me with, “happy birthday.” As an adult it has been difficult to dwell on my birthday.  “Happy Birthday…” Really!? A pure happiness is not of this world. I am here after 75 years, an astonishing, lucky win. After all the odds of arriving in the world were long, and to hang around for this long… Wow!  Just had another long sip of Starbucks coffee, hot, astringent, familiar – it’s good to be alive. “That” is the best gift of all.

To reflect upon Easter, or expressed with a bit more detail, Holy

Week. It’s in the rear-view mirror now, behind us. The idea is to remember the mythic tale of Jesus and his suffering, the recollection punctuated by rituals officiated by duly recognized ministers of your church.  Some still celebrate Easter in this manner. I remember how comforting the practices felt.

I cannot celebrate Easter in this manner. The world for me is one in which narrative myths are relics from the past, insufficient to compel allegiance, failing to describe a manner of day to day life as I experience

it. I do not think the cause of the demise of the old myths, or in Nietzschean terms, “the death of God” can be attributed to a comparatively greater intensity of stress than what was felt by a 12th century mason that worked on the foundations for Notre Dame in Paris. Rather, the texture of our lives living as we must by the regular beat of our machines, and by the full-out acceleration of cyberspace, and of commerce – we are whipsawed by a maelstrom of unnatural, conflicting currents.

A faith in divine creation, in the supervision of history by a super-powerful being, who ultimately guarantees that the loose ends to be tied together in a binary conclusion of endless paradise or unending torment is — well impossible to think.

So Holy Week is manifestly ordinary, an unholy, messy, what-you-see-is-what-you-get week for me. And that is becoming fine with me.  It is difficult to be human. Discomfort, suffering is experienced at many levels. We are scarred by living. No one can makeup (atone) for anyone but themselves.

I want to learn to become more responsible for every bit of it.

These photos come from the April 1st edition of The Morning, a New York Times newsletter. The images are a snap-shot of the variety of experience which constitute us Americans. Images are a suspension of time, a sliver of life which is always flowing. Nothing speaks for itself, because meaning depends upon context, upon what the mind makes of the circumstances.

These are surreal, each a revision of “reality,” actions which redraw the boundaries, the constraints of a life which we all share.

This tune seems right for today.  It’s the End Of The World As We Know It by R.E.M.  The world is reborn and is finished every day.  For “world” is nothing other than our human creation.