With Lent underway, the Spring Equinox last week, and Passover and Easter on the near horizon, we are in the midst of a bevy of holidays and holy days. In every place on the planet where the earth reawakens to a burgeoning new season of life-giving, life-affirming gifts, there is a sense of joyful abundance even as the news continues to sadden and alarm. We desperately need holidays, holy days.

In ancient times, Spring Equinox was recognized as a time for renewal, rebirth and revivification. It was the celebration of the symbolic resurrection of earth itself. No wonder Jewish and Christian holidays have incorporated (and, yes, appropriated) springtime rites of Indigenous peoples, adopting ancient symbols as their own. Easter may derive its name from the Teutonic goddess of spring and the dawn, Oestre or Eastre; Passover coincided with the spring harvest, and was originally a pilgrimage festival.

Neither Passover nor Easter are easy holidays to fully embrace or to understand. Passover — the story of the journey from slavery to freedom of the people of Israel — is also about a God who intervenes in history, favoring this one over that, delivering violence and destruction even upon children. And Easter — a story of terrible injustice and suffering — also includes a messiah who rises from the dead and died for the sins of those not yet born. These holidays may comfort, but may also deeply trouble.

Perhaps one of the purposes of the narratives of Easter and Passover has been to “people” the story of spring; to provide personages who look and act enough like us that we can relate to them, and to interpret the messages of the seasons with a narrative. Not a bad idea, as long as the stories somehow help us to be better people — working, for example, not only for our own freedom, but freedom for all — or becoming more astute in recognizing injustice and suffering wherever they exist, and finding ways to help and to heal.

Another holiday in this spring cluster is the most recent: Earth Day, April 22, is only 55 years young. Yet perhaps, right now, it is the most important one, the one that must become our new, global, holy day. Earth has her own story — surprising, astonishing, miraculous, and hauntingly beautiful. From eggs to rainbows, migration to adaptation, surviving, creating and endlessly diversifying, this place we call home is abundant in all the things that make fine storytelling, celebrations and rituals — just like those “old” holidays.

Yet even though Earth has her own stories (and thousands of them), only we humans can tell them — only we can look upon our home in awe, fall in love, and turn to one another saying, “Did you see that? Can you believe that? Isn’t that the most amazing thing ever? Who would have, could have ever guessed?” What we most need now is to proclaim the stories, choose symbols, and shape celebrations and rituals that truly connect humans with our home; and, in so doing, save what we love.

Here is an Earth Day story, which uses an apt springtime symbol for our times: an egg. It’s one of the most ordinary of images — something almost all of us have touched and held — and also a universal symbol of birth or rebirth, of fertility and promise of new life. Eggs are found all over the world, and their perfection and amazing qualities have led a number of cultures — Egyptians, Indians, Japanese to name a few — to a belief that the entire universe hatched from an egg. Ex ovo omnia — everything comes from an egg.

From the outside, an egg is stone-like. It does not look or feel like it could have life inside. An egg is completely self-sufficient. A chick grows by eating the yolk, not by taking in any food from the outside. Then, one day, there’s no more yolk to eat. All the chick knows to do doesn’t work anymore, and must do something completely different: peck its way out of a shell that is no longer a shelter, but a prison, find air and food. How does it know to do something different than anything it’s done before?

The transition a chick experiences from consuming the yolk to the first pecking is triggered by something of which we are very aware: too much carbon dioxide. The build-up of carbon dioxide inside an eggshell causes a twitch in the powerful “hatching muscle” at the back of a chick’s head. Repeated twitches of the hatching muscle make small cracks in the shell, which are the start of a new life.

It’s carbon dioxide that pushes the chicks to do something new, something they’ve never done before, to change their circumstances. If they didn’t, they would die. The beautiful image — the egg, from which life comes — which has come to represent all life — is not a metaphor. In fact, it is as real an illustration of our circumstances as one could find. An egg is, in miniature, the story we are living right now on this planet.

Happy Earth Day, and happy pecking!

The Rev. Alison Cornish is a Unitarian Universalist minister, lives in Shelburne Falls, and currently serves as the Chaplaincy Initiative Coordinator for The BTS Center. Find out more and connect at thebtscenter.org.