Easter to Gaia for May Day Yesterday in Asia and today acrossthe international dateline, we celebrate the empty tomb’s power beforeterminus. Today, we also mark Patriots’Day (giving one’s life on behalf of) and the day after Gaia gets her annual dressingwe recognize Professional Administrators who get the wheels of corporate operations,management, research, and development efficiently moving. I stick with the image of the power ofthe empty tomb. Heir to the Reformationthrough the Methodist Church in the Philippines, I grew up in the starkcontrast between the barren cross of the Christo Rei resurrected, and the threehour of solemn silence on Good Friday that my Catholic friends observed insubdued postures of penitence, penance, and avoidance of perdition; theycowered through religious obligations and duties Friday onward, while the restof us downed our wine on Thursday and chased the bunny wabbit in search ofcolorful eggs and petite Church school teathers early Sunday morn! Hollywood treats tall tales of high suspenseand adventure with the secure knowledge that at the end of the telling,characters that count “live happily ever after”. Most stories have happy endings. We Protestants go through the motions ofshedding crocodile tears on Holy Week assured that the pure white lilies and daffodils will grace the altar on Sunday morning. Theexistential high point in the Catholic liturgy is Friday afternoon when all thelights go off and space is imbued in three hours of the sounds of mystery,while the Protestants get up early Sunday morning to burst into celebrativehymns as they worship looking east at the crack of dawn. Easter quickly deteriorates into aPollyannaish stance. I latched on tothe symbol of empty tomb as it does not offer an easy escape into the otherOther World where one accumulated brownie points for the chance to wear toga toenter Peter’s pearly gates in the sky in the bye-and-bye, but to be flung backinto the wrenchingly fierce arena of authentic life (see you in Galilee) where themeaning of life’s existence resides all along. I recovered Easter back as a meaningfulterm when I discovered its Germanic origin of relating to Eastre, the goddess associated with spring. It is fitting that Easter this year is only48 hours from Earth Day. A word on spring. I am in the temperate zone in China so wehave four seasons, but the common saying in DongBei is that we have two days of autumn, two weeks of spring, two months ofsummer, and all the rest is b-r-r-r winter! In my four years in northeast China, this last one was the longestwinter, with the long john still within easy reach. Though the cherry blossoms on the two weeksof spring are blooming and its petals flying freely in the air, dawn and duskare still stalked by old man winter. It was in 1969 that the first EarthDay was suggested at UNESCO for a UN Peace Day celebration scheduled for March onMother Nature’s equipoise in the north. A US Senator a year later sponsored a law to hold an environmentalteach-in on April, and the Earth Day title added a real definition for Peace asprotecting the environment and everything in it. May Day is also a mid-springcelebration in the northern hemisphere, though it is the first day of summer inwarmer climes. The phrase is also usedin place of Titanic’s SOS (save ourship), an international code for extreme distress, now a generic call by anyonein trouble. Internationally, May Day isworkers day, a call on the captains of industries that lowly workers are humanbeings with innate rights, too. It is inthis vein that we match the glory of the empty tomb to the gory state of ourdevastated planet, and call on global workers, of which we consider our self apart, to save the earth’s planetary ship! I zero in on the Keystone XL pipelinethat is deemed “not a threat” to the environment from a State Department study(funded by you-know-who) to allow the hydrocarbons in the tar sands of Alberta,Canada to flow into the processing plants of the Gulf of Mexico. It awaits WH approval, clearly, a decision beingconsidered between “a rock and a hard place”! I am no doomsayer. Yes, the bestway of transporting bitumen is through a regulated pipeline, not to mention,the labor opportunities in its construction and maintenance. But is that all that is involved? We heard that the fracking of Ohio shaleis related to the recent earthquakes in the region as the tectonic plateresponds to the mining involving the literal shaking of the earth’s foundations. I continue to point to the current struggleof China on petrochemical byproducts (benzene and p-xylene) as wreaking havocon health and the environment. Our callre the health of the planet is the taken-for-granted-ness of all thederivatives we have come to enjoy for more than a century as perhaps needing ahealthy dose of SOS rather than a singular focus on the commercial bottom linebefore the whole Earthship turns to a story of gloom and doom for the humanrace. Consider the lilies ofthe field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin and yet Solomonin all his glory was not arrayed like one of these, said a sage ofold. Put a lily in mama Gaia's ear this week! j'aime la vie yesterday, appreciate; tomorrow, anticipate; today. participate. In all, celebrate!