SERENDIPITY

Call it serendipity if you like. A well-designed thing can look like good fortune if all the pieces are in the right place.

The sunlight beads across the hills in a thin corona, aeroplanes glint in the early morning air. Before long, the Earth slowly turns like a great, tilting table and the pale blue sky is filled with sun.

The wood pigeons, the starlings, the crows, the sparrows burst into song as long fingers of warm light caress the trees. Call it serendipity if you like, but everything seems to be in the right place at the right time.

I’m in the park on Easter Sunday morning, contemplating. It feels like a new kind of day, this, a new season. I pulled myself awake and hurried out here, ready to watch the sunrise. I’m glad I did.

The grass has turned to gold. There are long shadows falling across it that were hidden by the night. Dewdrops too! Like tiny sparkling pearls on the tips of each blade, perhaps unlike anywhere else in this vast universe of life and wonder. I watch the sun climb above the world and feel its warmth on my face. Serendipity.

I certainly did get to breathe the air. So many good things happened in Lent! Oftentimes I wondered what I would have written about them, and almost tried to make notes - but it was a lovely thing to not feel compelled to tweet, nor post on Instagram, nor write about them here. Even now I feel free of that burden. And it’s Easter! Seems like a good time to be free from a thing, if ever there were one.

If I close my eyes here in the park, I feel the warm Spring sunlight and hear the birds. I could almost be back in that garden, the garden tomb in Jerusalem that Paul and I visited at the end of my birthday. There’s a weird linkage between that moment and this - there, it was sunset in a place made famous by a sunrise; here, I’m watching the sunrise in a place I normally see it set. Nonetheless, I imagine those olive trees, the birds singing for joy, the quiet, empty garden being lit by resurrection sunlight. A silhouetted figure stands by the wine press, the light of life bursting from the cracked stone, the broken earth, the empty tomb. It feels like a new season.

The day has begun now. The sun’s already bright and warm and too difficult to look at. The early morning dog walkers are out and the park is coming to life with the happiness of right place, right time as the world spins gladly into Easter Day. Call it serendipity if you like. It certainly looks like design to me.