Easter

I had grown indifferent toward the Christian narrative that made me-suffering, death, new life. Change in religious and spiritual identity, and an increased pragmatism that I suppose comes with age. Any meaning I found in the Easter story lived in the women who huddled at the foot of the cross after everyone left. The ones who get such pitiful air time but witnessed the death and dressed the body and didn’t drone on and on about how it would all be ok.

Years later, I spent the final hour of my first psilocybin journey in the womb. For reasons I won’t exhaust now, this was the hardest place I could’ve been drawn into, and somehow the only place to go. I heaved and cried and settled into the fetal position. An hour later, my eyes opened, skin tingling as I filled my body, my life, again.

Of all things I could’ve thought as a re-emerged thinking being, I remembered the Jesus saying: “To be born again is the only way to eternal life.”

I sat up from the fetal position. And maybe for the first time, I believed him.

We-all of us-are risen.