Resurrection is a discipline. We live in a Good Friday world – patriarchal, consumerist, capitalist, colonialist. This world needs our Easter selves – hopeful, irrational, bursting out of the tomb, aspiring to love and kindness. Here are three poems to support you in your practice of resurrection.

Very little grows on jagged rock. Be ground. Be crumbled, so wildflowers will come up where you are. You’ve been stony for too many years. Try something different. Surrender.

Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

Let grief be your sister, she will whether or no.

Rise up from the stump of sorrow, and be green also, like the diligent leaves.

A lifetime isn’t long enough for the beauty of this world and the responsibilities of your life.

Scatter your flowers over the graves, and walk away.

Be good-natured and untidy in your exuberance.

Mary Oliver, from The Leaf and the Cloud

When your eyes are tired the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own.

There you can be sure you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb tonight.

The night will give you a horizon further than you can see.

You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness

to learn anything or anyone

who does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

David Whyte from The House of Belonging

Photo by Zoe Schaeffer on Unsplash