early easter sunday morning

It's that time of year, and here I am again, risen from the gloom of the garage bedroom, out into the early morning. I feel dehydrated and wooly minded and head out as this great boulder where we walk, we dwell rolls its horizon towards the sun.

As I walk the morning becomes un-tombed. The low, long shadows try hard to contain the night's chills but the sun is rising and all is ascending.
A hot air balloon drifts high on the far sierras, the moon a cusp of light clasped in blue. The warming air releases the fragrant lemon groves in bloom, swallows slip through the air in crazed parabolas of pure grace. I start to breathe.
There is birdlife all around me. Serins chattering their springtime assertions. A collared dove, roosters, a peacock proclaiming the opening flowers. I scuff at the path and it startles and releases a hoopoe dipping away over green fields of artichoke. It is all too much: the hot air balloon is closer and sinking low nearby. The moon quivers still. A butcher bird rises from the budding branch of a fig tree. I follow it and capture the slow splendour of a cattle egret beating its easy dalliance with the air lit by the sun against a Simpsons sky.
It is a riot of springtime. The world is truly risen. Our half of this lonely planet is turning towards the sun. It is colour, it is fragrance, it is sound. I am here again, I have ridden this boulder in space around the sun for a full orbit and I find myself standing with a sense of an ending slipping into a beginning: rolling right along. The swallows arc, dip and swing in elation. The serins chatter-knit their furious yellow. The hot air balloon is lost among the orchards. The moon: the moon on blue hangs still.
I have only been out here on this camino for 15 minutes.