Sometimes I like to imagine that the Easter Bunny is real. That there’s some sort of rabbit-kangaroo hybrid out there hiding baskets in our yards. Stimulating questions naturally follow: where did it come from? What does it want? How does it deliver all those baskets? Why is it interested in our children?
The answers aren’t pretty. They could be pretty, but Mother Nature is a taker. She craves the calcium in your bones and the calories in your liver. She is death itself with the minor benefit that she makes some pretty cool stuff out of the corpses. Art’s not really my thing, but it might be yours.
So, the bunny. Considering we are a world made up of multi organismal populations, a species of exactly one is unusual. As a classification, it’s unprecedented. That is until you smack into the glass ceiling of mortality and arrive at …
A god.
Okay, that’s a big step that’s stumbling into the religious aspects of Easter, but if you can bear with the lighthearted, macabre tone here, it generally fits (immortal, delivers billions of presents, can’t be killed believe me we’ve tried). Plus, most gods are poorly characterized. The Bunny doesn’t shoot lightning or fight evil across the globe, it lays eggs and hands out baskets. Some of the Greek gods did a lot less with a lot more at their disposal.
Okay, so where did Bunny come from? Just because we’re calling it a god here doesn’t mean it wasn’t born and once cute. It probably had a mom and twelve dads. But unlike you and me, it didn’t run off with the other hybrids and find happiness in a carrot patch filled with whatever kangaroos eat. It cut itself out of the herd and burrowed into an ultra-deep niche within our global ecosystem. The perfect key to the perfect lock. Space enough for just one. There, it thrived.
Wait. An evolutionary niche where delivering baskets and laying eggs leads to competitive fitness? How on Earth? Well, let me tell you. The eggs and the baskets are how it reproduces.
What? You said there was only one Bunny. Immortal god. Rides eternal!
Yeah, but this is the mechanism behind the magic. Bunny is an individual population that reproduces en-mass through a much larger population. Us. The eggs and chocolates in the baskets are its seed. They hatch within our young! The day after Easter, when all are sleeping and dreaming about sugar plumbs, the gestates crawl out of our ears and return to their master to rejuvenate it for another year.
Out of our ears.
It’s a sick, sick world. But, hey, free candy. Am I rite?
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