In which bush does the bunny hide?
When the grass becomes green, like in old school readers, and when the catkins develop their soft furs and the catkins hang down along young branches, the tops of the pricked rabbit’s ears and a small tail which would like to sunbathe protrude below many bushes and many tufts. This is how once spring used to come and also today - despite all climatic change - it is still how we are used to expect it and to look for it.
Our dear God did not make world just that it be deadly serious and respect only great themes. He left his script and the sense of his mercy on all that surrounds us and especially on all that which is small and cheerful. Although the greatest Christian holiday, Easter implies the dimensions of suffering and death and just by their turning into bridge leading to Father's home every joy acquires its legitimacy and its meaning. The rabbit, that small and timid animal, for which his antennas are his only weapon, is the symbol of that joy, of the victory over death, of that renovated and always renewable world.
All that what we experience today from the brighter, sunnier side has its long history in myths of various peoples. Rabbit is associated with the ancient goddess of Mother-Earth symbolising its fertile and fertilising waters. Thus, it becomes in itself the symbol of fruitfulness and reproduction and later even occasionally runs to the side of sins and bans. His mythic history does not have only its daily but also its nighty side. Rabbit is actually associated with the Moon, it is the creature of night; in some myths it rescues the Moon from the peril, becoming a hero; the Egyptian God Osiris is depicted in the shape of rabbit and Osiris’s fate explains the position of rabbit as a sacred sacrifice which gains new life through death. The simple minded rabbit approaches in that sense to Christian lamb, Jesus' symbol, so that its role in the Easter iconography is far more complicated from the one “at first glance” i.e. at first egg.
Though, it is human to rejoice. The bunny of Ms Sanja Rešček on this year's Easter stamp of Croatian Post, with its lovely head and masterful stylisation can provoke smile in anyone, which is also its intention. And then, he does creative work: he has just finished painting green an egg, adding small sunny spots to it – all that is needed so that we might feel joy from the soil beneath our feet upwards and that we might – together with the nature – become green up to our ears.
Željka Čorak
