Chol & Ash Wedneday

O, the dying of the day, where's when the Easter Egg?
Ash Wednesday's tav cross upon the forehead is made from the ashes from the burned palm crosses from the previous year's Palm Sunday. Ash Wednesday occurs 46 days before Easter and the hunting of the Egg.

Chol is the Hebrew word for the phoenix as well as the palm tree

" I am the last four days of yesterday, four screams from the edges of earth- beauty, terror, truth, madness-the phoenix on his pyre. "
-Normandi Ellis: The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Phanes Press, 1988

"There is another sacred bird, too, whose name is Phoinix. I myself have never seen it, only pictures of it; for the bird seldom comes into Egypt: once in five hundred years, as the people of Heliopolis say. It is said that the Phoinix comes when his father dies. If the picture truly shows his size and appearance, his plumage is partly golden and partly red. He is most like an eagle in shape and size. What they say this bird manages to do is incredible to me. Flying from Arabia to the temple of the Helios (the Sun), they say, he conveys his father encased in myrrh and buries him at the temple of Helios (the Sun). This is how he conveys him: he first molds an egg of myrrh as heavy as he can carry, then tries lifting it, and when he has tried it, he then hollows out the egg and puts his father into it, and plasters over with more myrrh the hollow of the egg into which he has put his father, which is the same in weight with his father lying in it, and he conveys him encased to the temple of the Sun in Egypt. This is what they say this bird does."
-Herodotus, Histories 2. 73 English translation by A. D. Godley. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1920.

"This egg is similar to Geb's egg that was laid on the primordial hill and gave birth to the sun, the egg within which the whole alchemical process of transformation is effected."
http://www.phoenixmoon.org/bennu.html

"...builds itself a nest of myrrh twigs that it then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix or phoenix egg arises, reborn anew to live again."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_(mythology)

Dark star crashes
pouring its light
into ashes

Reason tatters
the forces tear loose
from the axis

Searchlight casting
for faults in the
clouds of delusion

shall we go,
you and I
While we can?
Through
the transitive nightfall
of diamonds
-Dark Star words by Robert Hunter; music by Garcia, Kreutzmann, Lesh, McKernan, and Weir
Copyright Ice Nine Publishing

-Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris-