It's the Egg Holiday!

I wonder at what point in recent American history the Easter Bunny became a Santa Claus-like figure, where you sit on his lap at the mall and he hides things on your property in the middle of the night for you to find the next morning. In fact, when did it become THE Easter Bunny instead of AN Easter bunny? When did a rabbit come into play for the resurrection of Jesus?

I don't have to ask where the eggs came from, though. We have eggs at Passover. Jesus was probably eating them at the Last Supper, along with crackers and nasty low-proof wine that tastes like cough syrup.

Gross.

Whether it's Passover or Easter, though, I love the egg holiday. I love boiled eggs to either eat or decorate. I love that activity where you blow all the liquid out of the egg and decorate the hollow shell while you eat omelets. One year, I blew some eggs and used Elmers Glue to encrust them with glass beads and loose jewels. I hoped we stashed those in a safe place.

Of course I have loose jewels just lying around, I'm Catwoman.

Most of all, though, I love hiding the eggs and finding them again. It was always our tradition to hide and find at least two or three times on Easter Sunday because it's just so much fun! They're bright and cheerful, you get to put them in a pretty basket, and if you break one or lose one in the woods, it's no big deal--you'll just find it several months later and get the joy of squishing some gross rotting thing to see how gross and rotting it is. Few joys in a rural childhood can equal that.

Berry picking is fun, too.

 Even the Daifukuji Soto Mission hosts an annual egg hunt for the children. They usual schedule it for the same day they celebrate Buddha's birthday because everybody loves an egg hunt.

Even Buddhists.

Batman Buddha

Look at this comic book thangka. Just look at it.

Thangkas are Buddhist icons. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a nice collection of them in its Asia exhibits, and the Honolulu Academy of Art displayed a huge amount of never-before-seen Bhutan thangkas back in 2008. My sister and I went to that exhibit and walked through room after room of ancient and beautiful representations of the Buddha, the bodhisattvas, and the myriad demons and demigods that populate the Buddhist mythos. At the end of our patience and energy, I turned to my sister and said, "Soooo many thangkas." Which pretty much sums up my feelings toward museums.

But seriously, how about that comic book thangka? It's the ultimate Zen kōan, something that cannot be understood by rational thinking but rather must be intuited. So look at that thangka. Just look at it.