Tuesday, December 6, 2016

The Beagle of Westwego

Somebody said, a day after the election, in response to a newspaper image of spray painted White Pride alongside Trump’s name and a swastika on a baseball dugout, “Tell me my hatred isn’t justified.” I responded that hatred is never justified. This is how I met Will on the Facebook. Will shared my sympathies, liked the words that I wrote, and supported me with a blue thumb. I wasn’t sure what to think of him after spying on his page. He had no picture of himself, but there were quotes from Alan Watts and Rumi and other links and photos that suited my sensibilities.
I felt we would meet.
I didn’t know that our meeting would come about as a result of my using the facebook as a means of acquiring cheap rusted tin, tin I would need if I were to build the fence according to the wishes of my 85 year old neighbor, Mr. Lee. Though I thought treated wood might be cheap and easy, these thoughts did not align with those of Mr. Lee. In matters of fence building, or any building, or any matters for that matter, I always defer my ideas to those of Mr. Lee. Tin it would be.
            Will told me that he lived in Westwego, a suburb that is arrived at by driving East from New Orleans. I know not whether there was once an Eastwego that was West of the city, or if the Mississippi River has been snaking and confusing people since the time of the Native Americans. I did know that one should never go to any We-go alone. At least that’s what I thought, and I hadn’t seen my friend Michael for awhile, so we drove the twenty minutes, talking about God and Michael's recent trip across the border of Montana and Canada, about kids that get shot in New Orleans, about kids that do amazing things in New Orleans, about what grows best in this city without input, and about anything else that inspired us.
            Will met us in his driveway. He wore camouflage Carhart pants and gripped a long handled machete, not out of the ordinary for what I knew of Westwego, a place where an egret might land on your grass or a car might sit in your yard for years. Will’s house was more egret-in-grass than car-in-yard. His mutts seemed all too eager to take a bite, and it did not seem to matter whether the bitten was an intruder or visitor. Will eased the dogs away from us. He told us the machete might be needed to get to the tin.
I gave him a goji berry plant along with cuttings of betel leaf. I gave him the seeds of molokhia and lablab beans.
            There was a rabbit hutch where he kept his prized beagle, Ashley. He kept her there because the other dogs could not resist her feminine wiles. Will fiercely guarded her chastity. Ashley is a regal beagle, trained to participate in beagle contests on the weekend, trained on the ten acres that contained the tin, trained on the ten acres where Will spent his youth, listening and learning, much as the thirty beagles listened and learned from his recently deceased father. Ashley was the prize, Will’s pick, the only one he didn’t sell after his father was buried.
            My chest filled with my own sorrow.
            Will fed Michael and me red beans and rice because it was cold, it was rainy, because it was Monday. He said the toys on the floor belonged to his niece. Pictures of his family on the wall. The Stars and Stripes framed in a triangular glass case. Will told us what he had realized after his father passed, how beagles are like the best and worst of humans, how only the leader of the pack is actually sniffing while each one behind lazily follows, pretending, taking credit for what is really being accomplished by the leader. He explained the point system involved in these weekend beagle contests, a credit for sniffing out the rabbit, a credit for a marked turn (when the beagle senses that the rabbit has done a hundred and eighty degree turn.) Followers never get these points. Instead, they bump into one another like the Three Stooges multiplied.
            A leader beagle is aware, intuitive and adaptable. A leader beagle enjoys pain, relishes in the relief of running through brambles, takes delight in the cold and the wind and the blood dripping from the cuts on her skin.
            "It is not cruel," he said. "It is what these dogs have been bred to do for hundreds of years. It is what they love."
            I told him that when I think of beagles, I think of Snoopy and other fat dogs that friends of mine have had, of lazy dogs that lie in front of sunny windows, rising only to the din of food hitting their dish.
            “Ashley’s not fat,” he says, defensively. He paused and considered. “Well…she is fat, but you get her out there, you get her running through the woods, tracking a rabbit, and you would never know. You wouldn’t even be able to tell. You guys smoke weed?”
I said I didn’t. Michael said sometimes. Will said I don’t smoke it all the time, but when you are going to where we’re going it makes everything more beautiful.
I walked outside and looked into the hutch at Ashley. She appeared content and eager at the same time. Her ears were not as floppy as I would have expected. And she wasn’t fat. Thick, yes. But not fat.
I took more lablab beans from my truck and planted them near his fence to ensure there would be growth even if he forgot to plant what I’d given him.
            We loaded up and left in my truck. The ten acres were smack dab between the roads of Westwego, not far from the restaurant where New Orleans mob boss, Tony Marcello, conducted his affairs not so long ago. The ten acres seemed like a kind of place where his goons might have taken somebody for a ride. It seemed like the kind of place where men would hunt other men. I was glad that I no longer smoked weed and wished that I could have had the seeming trust that existed in Michael.
            It was muddy and dark beneath the canopy. We discussed turning something like this into an edible forest by working with what was already there, how it might become a model for other such projects, and only ten miles from the French Quarter. Will told us to be careful, that in fact, it’s proximity to the train tracks, where gutter punks disembarked before their ten-mile walk to the French Quarter, created random piles of human shit. 
            Will told us his dad’s dogs would listen to others but would never have another master. He led us toward what had been discarded: makeshift dog coops and lumber and tires and garbage; fenced-in areas set in the middle of a forest of oak, hackberry, saw palmetto, blackberry brambles, crawfish nests and other genus and species I did not recognize.
            “Let me show you the rest before we collect the tin,” Will said.
            He was our leader: ducking under branches, over logs, around trees, and through brambles, remarking upon the differences in light and microclimate, letting us know that a beagle—that Ashley—would indeed love this moist earth, the scent of the leaves, the way the sun split the seams of the canopy.
            Ten minutes in, everything looked the same. Were we walking in circles? Had I told anyone where I was going? Had Michael? I could no longer see the highway. I began to think that even Will was lost, that this was how weed made everything more beautiful, that this was what I loved about running through the woods as a kid, that this was what I loved about getting far, far out in the ocean, that this was what I feared about both. There would always come a point, a need to return to the beach, to the clearing, to the place where I felt comfortable and safe.
            My truck, along with all of what some might call rubbish, produced a sense of ease, a sense of trust, and if I was honest, there was really only ten percent of me that believed something might be awry.
Will exuded sincerity.
He went to work taking screws out of coops, pulling the tin from the roofs of dog kennels. I did not consider then how the facebook had turned from love to tin and back into love, but it did. In the midst of loading my truck, Michael asked Will whether there had once been a road in a spot that appeared more trampled than the surrounding area.
            “Come on.” We followed Will to a fenced in area. “This is where we brought the beagles that needed separated.”
            Two chairs, the plastic straps for seat and back coated in moss, sat next to one another, facing the gate door that was no longer connected to anything.
            “This is where we would sit,” Will said. “We would just let them calm down.”
            I thought of the last hours with my dad, of dipping a sponge the size of a sugar cube on a toothpick into water and then putting it in his mouth so that he could wet his tongue. I thought of him trying to reach for the back of his head and how I reached between his head and the pillow to scratch the matted hair just above his neck. It was the last warmth I felt. It was the last time he looked at me.
            Will leaned over and rested his arm on the back of the other chair. None of us said anything. Not even the traffic far off in the distance interrupted this moment that must have taken place all throughout Will’s life. He tapped the back of the chair.
“It’s been a long time, Dad.”

            And what I realized at the end of all this was that sometimes you think you are going into the woods for this tin and you may never cross the bridge back into the city, yet you never think of all the connection you are able to bring, simply by saying yes. And to think…only hours before you almost sold yourself short in this game of seconds and minutes, almost talked yourself out of going in this cold rain, and who would have told you that this was the wrong move?
            Nobody.
            People would have said to go another time. People would have said why not just buy the sixty sheets from that other guy and forget about all of this. But there is something which exists within each one of us—call it god or conscious connection—and this something was screaming to go, and in these moments of Yes!...when the entire picture becomes clear, when the realization hits, when you understand just how all of this is connected—this is the realization of your birth.

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Boxers

I am twenty seven years old, an American male, stranded in Fukuoka, Japan, 2001, stuck in a business man hotel. Not the room where they slide you into the wall like a coffin, but not much bigger than this either. I don't have any money because last night I got so drunk that the last thing I remember is eating ramen noodles inside a corner store before walking through the streets past newspaper vending machines with cards of sexy Japanese girls and every guy I passed seemed to be yakuza, seemed to be staring me down, seemed to know just who and what I was.

I bite off my fingernails and then my toenails and make a pile next to a black book called The Teachings of Buddha. It along with green tea have been my only company since waking up at noon. The traffic and smog are an arms reach. There is no way I could fit through the window, but reading this book brings me to the idea that I am here forever and always has been.

I drop my nails nine floors down to the street below where the constant stream of cars and bicycles flow together like water. I wonder if I will ever get back to Korea. I wonder why my boss sent me over here without telling me how much a passport renewal would cost. I know that if nothing else happens that I will be a part of Japan forever.

There is a passage about what should happen to clothes, how once they are no longer suited for wearing they become something with which to do the dishes, and once the rag no longer suits the dishes it can be used to clean the floor, and once the shreds of cloth no longer suit that purpose, it can be used for lighting a fire or something else that I cannot recall.

I am forty-two years old. It is the year of my Uranian opposition and I am not sure exactly what this means. I am sitting in an airbnb that my girlfriend owns. Sometimes I think she is my fiancé. I am in New Orleans, Louisiana, the greatest city in the United States. Blocks away drunk people are running up and down Bourbon Street and inside the Penthouse Club there may be similar cards to those I found in Japan fifteen years ago.

I bend over to pick up my shirt and realize my boxer shorts have a hole that stretches from waist to where the legs meet. The patience needed to take this garment through its proper Buddhist procedure is not there. Still I think of the moment, alone, in that Japanese hotel. And I think of now, alone in this airbnb. And I think about how neither time was I alone, and I think I knew this then. I know that I know this now.

Tomorrow I will take these boxers to the house where I live. I will check on the two ducks that a friend just gave me because the boy duck was trying to fornicate with her hens. I will bury these boxers inside beneath what used to be a pile of compost. Time will pass. The ducks will cross back and forth inside this cordoned off space where I use what might otherwise be thrown away to give back to the soil that gave me my life.

Worms will feast. Worms that don't need any of us to see anything that they are doing. Worms will turn what once covered me and stopped drips of urine from showing on my pants, worms will turn this back into the nutrients that will sustain. The ducks may eat some of the worms. The worms will die and other worms will eat these worms. Then spiders will eat those worms. Then those spiders will die and worms will eat those spiders, and so on….

What I did not know that day I ran out of money in Japan: that all of death is life; that nature figured out all of this long before us; that waste is a man made idea; and that love is where you find it, be that inside a room alone or out on the street where the lights are glistening and lust is calling and my toenails are slowly decaying at the base of a cherry tree while the blossoms blow through the street like snow in fall.

Saturday, September 17, 2016

Tip of the Tongue

Listening to Beck live I realized how much I have been conditioned to think that what I hear on a record is permanent, that the same thing can be done the same way time and time again and further more, that I want to hear the album version of life, the rendition that I am used to, and not only that, I want everyone to sing along in my key, in my time, and I want to walk through the streets with people that know when to approach and when to walk away.

There are no signs I need to obey except for my own and it cannot be that much of this. I have things to take care of. Sleep apnea causes me to be tired all the time yet I have not had a machine in almost two years because I do not want to be hooked into the wall when I sleep. 

CPAP machines are straight out of a Philip Dick story. You see us in the airport. We are usually fat and jaundiced and look as if we have given up on life. Then there are those like myself. Or am I the anomaly? A man that survives years of smoking Winstons and Marlboro Reds and ounces and pounds of weed and resin, a man that puts chemicals in his nose and enough booze in his system to hold a family of ducks. Then he stops and his life carries on and this snoring that was filmed by a woman he might have loved keeps coming to the surface. It is like thunder among trains. It is like one of the favorite things that I love about my neighborhood: noise. Noise, and I want to be left alone.

That is another strange concept. I want to be around all of the action and I want to let love flow between me and the people I know and don't know. Then there are other times where I want to walk outside, from my truck to the porch and back without hearing, "Mr. Zach". I want to say you never move or you got nothing better to do than sit and wait to yell at the people passing by? I'm a busy man, goddammit, got things to do. Other times, on other days, the same exact scenario, and I walk down the street because I want to be a part of life, whatever that might be. 

I want to believe that everything I encounter is delivered by the divine and that it is the way I choose to let it seep through and collect, or whether I filter and sift some of it out, or whether I block what is coming in altogether. Sometimes it is necessary to block what is coming. This does not mean that every act of man is a gift from God. This only means that I must be aware of how every act of every other man affects me and then determine where I am.

Yesterday was not the first time I heard somebody say, "He's trying to play God." What that person meant was that he did not want to hear and did not like or agree with what the other person was saying. I think the wrong words were used. I think the one playing God was the accuser. I think the accused was just playing himself on a stage that was created by God and the accuser decided that he needed to not only write his own lines but the lines of the other actors as well.

So…if yes is the ultimate answer to the universe, are there ever times when I might be denying the divine by falling into a play that God has not made? The answer is yes. The determination is less simple. So if I am a part of God and I am walking around this earth encountering other parts of God, and I am also encountering a myriad of ids running loose and am not well enough equipped to determine the fine lines sometimes, what am I to do? This is when the need arises for silence.

What is it about life that man has been conditioned to think the best way to figure things out is to run and think and preprogram and drink of every idea and every philosophy and every question when sometimes the best answers come when we stop, when we let the water fill the bathtub and rest. Is that not how relativity was discovered? Is that not how Jim Morrison finally determined what was best for his tortured soul.

De Mello says that we do not want to wake up. If we woke up there would be nothing left to chase. What De Mello did not say is that we are already awake. Or maybe he did. Maybe I just wasn't paying attention. I am not one that retains all he reads, and I have been accused of reading to escape the moments of life.

I did read something that said that all we take in is available for recall, and although a man like me thinks that he remembers nothing about what he has read, that it is up there somewhere. It is like trying to think of the name of a person you have know all your life. It is one of those tip-of-the-tongue moments.

Maybe awakening is just like that. It is within us, sitting on the tip of our tongues and instead of getting silent and letting this come forth, I walk with a determined step, more determined that others follow the same path, I sing with a baritone, holding space only for Waylon and Wille and the boys when really my songs may be coming to me in the form of Nicky Minaj yet I do not want her on my sidewalk. I cut off what will lead me to the tip of my tongue. I sift through all that you say to prove you wrong.

I wrote nearly everyday of the year 2000. I believed that somehow it would be momentous to bequeath this gift to future generations. I believed it would be my opus. My magnum opus! There for the inhabitants of Mars to read what was happening in Iowa City way back then when people still lived on Earth…and as I wrote this magnum opus, I discovered one of my favorite things to do, alone in that room that had a permanent smell of bulgolgi and a window through which I wrote about snow and fallen leaves, was to race the clock, to start around eleven thirty at night and write as quickly as I could, to get all of the words out before midnight...

...somewhere I got the idea that this was not writing, that guys like Henry Miller and Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac were frauds. And somehow this aligned with my own notions, with the same notions that everyone has, that I am a fraud…Well…I'm here to tell you that I'm back. I'm here to have fun. I'm here to put down my words--words that are not carefully crafted (I have always been a bad editor), but words that come from a place that is sometimes beyond me, from a place that I cannot channel when I am crossing the street to avoid myself….And I am here to share them without thought or care of what anyone does or does not think.

END


You want Smells? Read the three pages of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel where he describes nothing but...
You want the Street? Read Ann Petry's novel of the same name
And there is a book by a Jewish writer about the streets of New York that I thought was called The Walker, but cannot seem to remember the exact name because I'm having a tip-of-the-tongue moment...



Thursday, September 15, 2016

A Full Tub Can Become a Baby Tornado Roaring Down the Drain



Some thoughts you just can't share for fear of being locked in a room with no door handle. Like who is this woman cleaning my teeth really hooked up with? Or is my brother only a figment of my mind that people don't want to tell me about. How about why are they all watching me?  (Come on, we have all had this one.) These thoughts and others bring me to this: what is the line between madness and curiosity, between madness and genius, between madness and an ever loving zest for life?

There is an amazing new documentary called Bayou Maharajah about the incomparable New Orleans piano player, James Booker. If you thought my description of him unnecessary then you know exactly who and what I'm talking about. This man could do things with his fingers and mind that made both the jazz and classical world cringe with jealousy. He said that his gift was just the divine flowing though him.

The one flaw of the documentary was that they did not go deep enough into his heroin addiction, into the madness that exists within that world, into the loneliness that comes with being alone in a room filled with people. Would this divine outpouring of joy, this call to sail forth amidst the storm, this battle cry of ivory have been the same without the heroin? What about Ray Charles and Jerry Garcia and Hunter S. Thompson and Vincent Van Gogh and Edgar Allen Poe and Kerouac, and man could I go on and on.

There is something in a man (not unique to man, I'm sure, but I will speak for my gender) that causes him to question if what he is doing will garner respect or admiration or praise. Booker hit the nail on the head when he said that the divine poured through him, that that was all it was, that this did not belong to him. I wonder how often the divine sits in a tub plugged up with doubt and shame. I wonder where any of this comes from. I wonder about those that have died running from the divine.

I cannot stop thinking of James Booker, dead in the waiting room at Charity Hospital. I wonder who first noticed that this man with a star patch on his eye, waiting in the chair across the room or next to him was dead. I wonder if others in the room recognized him. I wonder if some realized that, hey, that's James Booker, tapped him on the shoulder to say hello, and then realized he was unresponsive and stiff.

I say all of that to say this, I guess, or maybe because I just like the saying: I say that to say this: Are there sacrifices? Are there times when it is necessary for a man to die in a waiting room at forty-three years old so that the world will forever have this divine gift bestowed upon them. Perhaps. Consider all those that have died dating the devil to court the divine.

Now consider a race raised without shame. A race trained to dance and Sing in the Rain, not to look like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire but because they're there and the rain is there and the joy of the moment does not care whether or not anyone is watching. Consider songs sung by those that should not sing songs. Consider Tom Waits and Bob Dylan. Consider the children.

There is not a map or a starter kit or any type of preparation manual that will cease identification with the mind and body, for we are mind and body, we are human, and I am not even sure I know what I believe happens when the breath stops in this body. Still I will search for a way towards the divine and I invite any that want to come along with me. I must admit that I don't know where I am going and that we will get lost and back track and fight and argue and step into ego suits.

I will start by asking people what was the last thing they experience which brought them joy. Or what have you been passionate about in the last week. People look at you strangely when you ask these questions. There is no box to put somebody in when he says, "My African Gray parrot said my son's name for the first time. Now I'm training him to sing happy birthday for when Charlie turns seven." rather than "I am a plumber," or "I am a student".

There is something to be considered in this unending quest for information, this interview style of meeting someone. I don't know what it means, what any of it means, really. I do think that this will be an interesting experience for me, leading with the questions about joy and passion. I think that their passions will influence my passions and together we will get that much closer to whatever divine is supposed to flow through us at that moment.


Wednesday, September 14, 2016

The Word of God

In Grist for the Mill, there is a section where Ram Dass is going to meet with some men in India or somewhere and have dinner and just be himself. As the night unfolds, the talks of the business world and politics unfurl, and because Ram Dass has read the entirety of the most recent Newsweek magazine on the plane ride over, it is his duty to let his hosts know of his expertise.

These men are so impressed by his wisdom that they invite him to speak at a dinner before their associates. He tells them that he first must ask his guru, so a couple of the men follow him into the place where Maharjji is staying. He asks his guru. In short, what Maharajji tells them is that Ram Dass would be happy to come and also that Ram Dass only speaks about God.

This presents a problem. The men wanted to hear his ideas, to have him share with those they know the perspective of a Westerner. They decide that perhaps somebody more equipped to talk about business and politics will better serve their agenda. I don't remember if Ram Dass had a great realization, but I did.

We think in terms of division and then go about wondering how we can bring people together, how we can get some of these people to realize the destruction they are putting this world and it's inhabitants through. We think in terms of solving problems and creating change and piling on more and more sand as if once we get enough, this sand will stop sliding down the sides.

People get uncomfortable when you approach them with the idea that we are not mind or body, that we are mere vessels that hold and pour out God. It is hard to be violent, to be right, to be afraid, and to need when this is the condition we live in. The mind wants to categorize, wants to have a reason why, wants to connect with other people not in order to share the God in their vessel with the God in our vessel, but to regurgitate the ideas that he has to make him feel safer. So we run with those that believe and do the same things and all of it is false.

No wonder there is a problem with separation, with fighting about who is right. No wonder so many succumb to whiskey or women or dozens of Snickers bars when the only thing that feels like home is a far away place we spend our entire lives running toward. What if I were to tell you that you are home right now? What if this is what I am telling myself? What if I fully realized that these words are not mine, just like the books of Ram Dass are not his, just like the land where I live is just as much mine as it is the frogs I did not even know were here until yesterday?

I am a steward whose answers come in silence. The answers then transfer through me and back out of me and into me through the awareness of a day that has started in silence. There is nothing to be fixed. There is only the notion that we are spirits and the unravelling of all that is not, the stripping away of the very ideas we have allowed to separate us from each other.

Each new butterfly I see is my reason to continue planting seeds. Each person that walks up and wants to ask me questions about growing is an opportunity to share what I have learned, what I have found, the mistakes I have made. Even saying that is a disservice to God and this world. We have been conditioned to think in terms of success and failure when what nature might tell us, what exists within the vessel is the notion that every action is an opportunity, for growth, for the world to work better as a whole.


Tuesday, September 13, 2016

I Am Only the Bottle

If I write my truth, surely I will find my audience.

I missed an opportunity with Desmond yesterday, when he stopped me in the street "You remember me," and asked if he could help with anything, said that he needed some change to get a little something at Church's. Not only could I have helped him to make a little change, but I could even have given him some food so that he didn't have to eat nasty fast food chicken.

Jasmine called me and said that the guy that was with Quinn signed a paper that said that he picked Quinn up after stealing the car and that Quinn didn't know about the gun. She said that Quinn would probably be getting out of jail after the next court date. This scares me because I want to work with him again. I want to plan these Sunday events where people come together to eat and to share music and art and whatever else anybody has to offer. 

I want the land to be alive with dragonflies and spiders and frogs and life. I want the chickens to feel comfortable enough to roam beneath picnic tables eating what has been dropped. I want to sleep like a normal person so that my lover will love me. I want to make love to my lover but I only know how to have sex and I don't know much about any of that.

Today she told me that I am not the wine in the bottle. That I am the bottle. That this land and these plants that consume me are the land and plants of god and that these people that I talk to are his, too. This is kind of like what others have taught me, about always saying yes, but then sometimes there is a perfection that I will never attain and then that same perfection that I expect of others. 

Then there is me wanting to run away from everything, to say fuck this house and this land and to just take a notebook and a pillow and write about fire and the stars. It takes a lot to admit that I don't know everything, that as much as I state that nature is perfect, that today I pulled bush killer and other weeds and then burned them because I knew no other way, because I believed Luke when he told me that there is an ancient tradition that believes that by burning the very things we don't want growing and then spreading these ashes on the land that the land will listen. Is this part of my own mistake? Is this my trying to be the wine?

In honor of nature and to create more space for what is already growing, I snipped molokhia, eggplant, and okra for soup and started up the crockpot. I ate a cucumber and shared some with the chickens. We also shared persimmons. I gave them the ends that the rats had bit through and I ate the insides. I gathered a few kumquats from the ground around the tree and made tea with holy basil and elderberries. I was determined not to drink caffeine and to live off the land. All or nothing.

Then I went to a meeting. I drank two cups of coffee. I ate five slices of pieces afterwards. It is far past midnight and I cannot sleep. I think too much about what people will think about what I write. I once listened to Elizabeth Gilbert give a Tedtalk where she explained that back in the day the Greeks gave all the credit to god or to the muse or to something outside of themselves, that they were just a vessel. a bottle, pouring the wine for others to drink. If this is the truth then I will just let whatever comes out come out and in the process I might find myself and he might find himself and she might find herself.

These old thoughts that I must be right are killing me. I can't stand them. I can't stand being around people anymore because i see everything in them that is not perfect about me. I keep looking at bottles, bottles everywhere, expecting to smell wine pouring forth from their mouths and from their pores and through them and into my bottle, but I don't even know yet about the wine that is pouring through me or how much I hold. I know only that every act is an act for god and each thing that I do brings me closer to or further away from the divine because you cannot spend a lifetime holding and pouring wine without a little bit remaining stuck on the bottle.







Monday, August 29, 2016

Burned

You never want to believe that the brother you love has a mental illness. You want to call it alcoholism or drug addiction and put him in a box that you can understand because you can only see the world through your own squinting eyes.

Two hours ago, less than two weeks after your father’s death you get a phone call that he went into the garage of his ex wife’s house, doused himself in gasoline and then lit a match. He was found only because her visiting friend heard screaming and came up from the basement to find him in flames.

When you learn to write, there is an exercise that many teachers will give to allow you to pry into your own subconscious. They have you wander into the basement of a childhood home and feel around, feel the cinder block walls, smell the soot and mildew, let the dampness around the sump pump touch your skin. Then find a hole, a hole that never existed when you lived in the house, and walk through. Describe what you see:

A brother, rail thin, running through the yard and down to the creek. A brother running after me. A brother that wants to be in our club, that wants to swing across the rope we tied to the tree above the creek, a brother that you trained to wrestle and fight and not to be afraid of anything, and then a brother lost, a brother bearded, a brother with eyeballs the size of gumdrops and then you see this brother running, alone and lost, nineteen years old in the same city where you grew up and you hear that this brother now believes that he is Jim Morrison and Jesus Christ.

And then you hear the voices of the people that unintentionally killed your love for putting words on paper. You hear them yelling about redundancy and self consciousness and Sigmund Freud and commas. You want so much to get back to the place where words made everything make sense. But you cannot.

You can only know that you do not know, and that should be enough. Knowing is not up to you. Knowing is hubris. Knowing is you at age sixteen, forcing your brother to put Copenhagen in his lip and not spit out any of the juice, you telling his twelve year old mind that tobacco will make him a man. Then you play catch. Catch consists of you using his swaying body as a target, of you aiming the ball like a bullet into his chest.

And you wonder if it was you that killed him. You wonder if it was you that somehow brought on this mental illness. And you wonder what it feels like to be on fire. You wonder what they wrapped him in before loading his body into the helicopter. You wonder about whether or not you will be able to feel his spirit if he dies in the sky.

You know that the love you have for your father rides with you in your mother’s car. You know that this love sits beside you on a plane. You also know that you were never able to understand exactly why your brother did what he did or felt what he felt.

You have this gift of the moment. Do not let any tell you what to do or what to write or how to grow or who to befriend. Do not let anyone tell you anything. Walk with love, filled with the spirit of all that connects us. Run with the notion that you will never get there. Look out to the clouds when sitting next to the airplane window, and if he dies, should he die, know that he exists within there. Know that you need not know the chemical composition of a cloud or a rose in order to appreciate the sensation you receive.

Know you do not need a mind or a body to inhale the love that is within. Know there are some not made to stay on this earth. Know that this is their journey. Know that this is yours.





Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Regenerate

Most people I meet seem to think that they can learn something from me when it comes to growing. I write not to say that what I do is the right way or the only way or even that it is mine. I write to share my experience over the years.

Nature abhors a bare ground. Walk through a forest and you will notice that every inch is covered, each plant, each log, each bit of moss and lichen serve their purpose. I do not blame myself or others for thinking that the best way to grow something is to make sure that there are no "weeds" or anything else growing between the targeted species. It started with industrial agriculture. It made the harvesting of crops easier and more economical. Now it is destroying the soil. 

Take a moment to imagine that you are your favorite bug and that you have just flown into a field of your favorite fruit or vegetable. A smorgasbord. A free for all. You eat, unimpeded, hopping or flying from one leaf to the next until you are so full that you can eat no more. You call your brothers and sisters and friends and cousins. That's what this type of growing provides. So the people come in and try to save what is being taken. People have this idea of mine and not yours. People have this idea of existing separately from nature. 

Then the people that are mad at the people that use chemicals from paint companies and from the war machine decide that they will no longer eat this "conventional" food. They think that they are doing their bodies a a service, and they may be. Their eating organic may be better for their body than eating conventional. What most don't know is that both crops are sprayed. Both crops are heavily managed. Both crops are unnatural. And both crops harm the earth by killing the very mycorrizae, bacteria, and nutrients that exist within the soil. Anybody remember a little state called Oklahoma? The Dustbowl.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't? No. There is another way.

You are still your favorite bug. You are still searching for your favorite fruit or vegetable. This time there is no smorgasbord. This time there are smells and sounds and different colors and shapes and the sky is buzzing with enemies and allies and you don't know which are which. It is a goddamn jungle out there. That's life. That's how we share. That's how we get back to serving nature. That is the beginning of the end of every problem. 

How you ask?

Well…every problem stems from the false notion of separation. Most of us see this problem, if we are even aware enough to see it, as separation from one another. It runs much deeper. It starts with our separation from the earth and spreads like a virus, like a plague of your favorite bugs attacking all that you hold dear. And you sit back and think that there is nothing you can do.

Find out where you food comes from. Is the farmer regenerating the land on which he grows? Is the farmer creating an ecosystem that fosters a variety of species that serve not only her but each other. Search the web for regenerative farms. Can't find any in your area, ask the farmers near you why they aren't practicing regenerative farming. 

The problem is deep. The problem is concrete, and more, the problem is the control that we think we need to exert over what lies beyond the concrete. Am I getting too far out there? I'm not just talking about cement anymore, so I will reign it back in and let you know what you can do should you wish to leave this earth in halfway decent shape for your children and your children's children.

Do not spray anything. Write letters to the companies and businesses that sell the poisons that cause our cancer. Write to politicians. Buy from the farmers that live closest to you. Grow your own damn food. But I don't know how.

Start with mint. Don't like mint, start with arugula. Don't like arugula, start with rhubarb. Don't like any of that? Change your tastes because when did health become about what feels good? I'll tell you…when they started planting in rows and spraying poison on the earth and realizing that as long as what was packaged was filled with salt, sugar, and fat, we would eat it. We would buy it like fat, mindless gluttons while lining their pockets. Once the people with money decided for us what we wanted, got us hooked on these drugs, and then made them available in mass quantities while phasing out nutrients and other necessities a new business could be born. Keeping us sick! Enter pharmacy…ah, but I digress.

Look at any problem. You cannot fight the problem. You must know who is benefitted by keeping the problem a problem. These are the people you must fight. 

I began writing this with the idea that I would talk about what you might do to make the place where you live more like nature while still feeding yourself and your health and your spirit and your neighbors. I want to help you, wherever you are to enter into a relationship with from what you came. 

Look around your neighborhood. What grows naturally? What grows without inputs from you or others. Find edibles that are in the same genus. What perennials grow well in your are? What do you want to experiment with?

Waste nothing. Some of your neighbors will be gracious enough to leave brown paper bags filled with biomass on their curbs. These are there for the taking. Find a corner of your yard where you might store these. Have a water source for birds. Another for frogs. If you are growing a fruit tree, plant other coppice trees around it. Don't know what coppice means? I'm going to pull a Leon George: "Look it up." In New Orleans I use moringa and cassia pendula. These can also protect the young fruit tree because both are slow growing. 

Practice STUN: a term coined by Mark Shephard that stands for sheer and total utter neglect. Want to grow a tree? Start fifty seeds and give none of them any love other than a passing I LOVE YOU. I am not kidding. Have fun. Nature has no word for failure. Nature has no word for mistake.

I grow malabar spinach and longevity spinach and molokhia and chives and other plants that need no care right outside my back door. If you live in Wisconsin, maybe you don't get to eat oranges. Maybe that's they way it should be. Maybe you should get them only on Christmas like my grandmother did. 

There are some books, too.

My favorites are:

One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukoaka
Sowing Seeds in the Desert by Masanobu Fukuoka
Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmiller
Edible Forest I and II by Dave Jacke with Eric Toensmiller
Restoration Agriculture by Mark Shephard


Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Awake

Maybe you need to be okay with four in the morning and seven dogs out in the Georgia countryside. Maybe you need to be blessed by your father's death and the fact that you get to live out all of what he never got, and maybe the heat of this evening has nothing to do with why you can't sleep. You may give all that is in you and never get what you think that you should. This is not the end of the world. This is quite the opposite. It is the beginning.

You have never shot guns at roadsigns or ran people of another color out of your little countryside. You have never settled in these hills and lived off the land and bent trees to show others in your tribe how to get to water. You have never been separated from the pack and howled so the others could hear you. Or have you? What makes you think that you might be able to predict the future?

There is an ocean of blessings with your name written on the surface and yet you fill only a bottle. You come to the mouth and quit because you don't know how to drink salt water. You are a cow without knowledge, a bowing sow of iniquity, a manatee at best, living within the chains of infamy. I may say this is tomfoolery, words spilling at four in the morning, but you know about the golden thread that runs through everything and will sew all of them together if only your eyes are open.

What about your ideas? What about everything that falls? What about everything that exists within the soil that is fed by all that falls and the fact that you have been sitting around waiting for something to rise, waiting to be noticed, afraid that you are not like him or her. You ARE NOT like him or her. There can be only one you. This is what is beautiful: you and the world exist within one another. You are the world and the fly and the grass and each peach pit and the cyanide inside that even a horse knows enough to spit out. You are alive. Yet you are not the you that cannot stop thinking. You are the you that wonders why can't I stop thinking like this.

Revel in this. Those you have met that have met those that have been affected by those you met before meeting them. It is a tongue twister of connection you damn well better serve with reverence for the tree, reverence for the bird, reverence for the leaf that drops, the leaf you touch, the stem, your eyeballs and the book she pulls off the shelf and tells you, "I think you should read this."

Listen to all you meet, especially those that you do not agree with for they are showing you a side of yourself that you cannot see. Listen and read, but most importantly, touch, get down on your knees and look at what is beneath your feet, crawl back into the ocean, realize that you are the sun. You are the receded water, the seed, the one celled being that once lived only in water.

What a mystery, not knowing where the spirit that has always been there goes when someone dies. What a gift to be able to imagine it to be anything that you want it to be. Like god. Like that man you met years ago, that man that was yourself, that man that knew there was no way out but refused to stop fighting. That man that then asked for help. Who and what is god? Not you.