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.