Pussy Willow Happy Sunday.

“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus

I photographed these Pussy Willows on an eBike photoprowl around my neighborhood last week, and posted one of the shots as the “Pic for today” yesterday. I remember seeing them in spring, on my grandmother’s dinning room table in a vase, but when doing a bit of research on them yesterday I found that they were probably there to celebrate Palm Sunday. As one of the first signs of spring in the frozen north of the world, worldwide, they are treasured and collected for display...but specifically they have been used in place of palm leaves, where no palms grow, to commemorate Palm Sunday. Palm Sunday, of course, celebrates Jesus’ entry on a donkey into Jerusalem the week before his crusifixion and death and resurrection...when the crowds lined the streets and laid down palm branches to shield his donkey’s feet from the dust of the way...the historical equivalent of the red carpet. It calls up a vivid image for me...of crowds of folk still in their winter coats and hats and gloves lining a street wet with melting snow and laying down bunches of Pussy Willows like a corduroy carpet to ease Jesus’ way. They would already have had them in their houses, to celebrate the coming of new life in spring, and they would have, prophetically, brought them out to celebrate the new life soon to be revealed in Jesus...the spring of the spirit soon to be released in the spring of the world. I may not ever again be able to look at a Pussy Willows without that image in my mind...and that is okay. Anything that opens the generous eye to see beyond the physics of this existence to the eternal truth of the spirit that informs all that is and all that lives is “a good thing”. That is Jesus...spirit made flesh...and if that is also the Pussy Willow, so much the better. I am not going to suggest that you go out, if you live in the north of the world, and collect Pussy Willow today...there are too few Pussy Willow trees left in our diminished age...but if you are out and about and happen to see a Pussy Willow in full display today, think of Jesus. That is all the generous eye could ask. Happy Palm Sunday! Happy Pussy Willow Sunday!