Signs of Transcendence

A meditation on the end of winter

Feb 21, 2026

For those of us living in the cultural center of the Universe (Indiana) January got pretty rough: over a foot of snow followed by 10 straight days of sub-zero weather.

But February has been different: the sun decided it did not, in fact, hate us and blessed us with some warmth.

And this morning I was blessed with something else: a hint of green peeking through the brown mulch of Joe’s memory garden.

That’s what Amy and I call the heart-shaped garden in our backyard, filled with perennials of various kinds. In June and July black-eyed Susans, day-lilies and coneflowers compete for glory, exploding in yellows and purples and oranges of different shapes and sizes. But in the winter the stalks have all been cut down and composted, and the dirt-brown mulch survives as the only color, shape or texture.

That’s why the green shoots poking their vibrant noses out of the mulch made me so happy this morning: They are signs of transcendence.

Transcedence is a twenty-dollar word for a very simple concept: There is something beyond. Beyond what we can see. Beyond what we can understand. Beyond what we can know (at least in an intellectual sense).

I am thinking, in this context of course, of something that transcends death.

Death seems like the ultimate finality. But is it?

Imagine if the span of an average human life was not 80 years but 80 days. Imagine people who were adults by day 20, middle-aged by day 50 and retirees by day 65. Those born in May or June would see the cone-flowers and black-eyed Susans whither and fade and then die at the first frost. All that their senses would tell them is that flowers blossom and flourish, then wilt and die. End of story.

They would have no idea of a flower whose life transcended the winter.

We interpret life by our experiences within this life. But do we have to? Are we sure we have the full picture?