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.

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

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.

The Climb

Maybe I made a mistake when I told Miss Treecie that Javante killed Cash's puppy and left it in my rain barrel. Maybe she was no more surprised than Javante was when he said, looking away from me, afraid to face the barrel, afraid to even look up, "I think there's a dog in there. Mr. Zach, I think a dog drownededed in there."
     I knew as soon as I told her that it was a bad idea, but Cash's baby mama said I had to, and Javante's mom had already been summoned. What did I look like from her side of the fence? Only my head was visible and boy did she yell at my head. "Who you think you is? Not my boy! You got him on camera? No? Then shut the fuck up."
     Javante was one of my best helpers when he helped, when it was just the two of us and none of the other kids were around. He helped me build a bench, even helped to design the damn thing. It weighed about six hundred pounds because it was flat two by six screwed to flat two by six about eight high. It didn't matter. We did it. We built it with wood I found in piles throughout New Orleans, wood my wife told me I was not allowed to bring home anymore. I didn't let him give up on himself, even when the screwgun seemed too heavy and he had to use both hands, even when he said, "I can't do this"…I said, "You can." And he did. He said, "You gonna tell my mama this?" I said I would.
     Javante was the leader, the brave navigator that scaled my fence and entreated new troops daily. When I complained to my wife about the two broken windows, the burnt hammock, the smashed terra cotta pots, all the cups and plates I left outside that he then shattered--when I complained about the aronia berries, the orange pomegranates, the goumis, and the numerous other starts he dumped out for kicks, she said, "Maybe this is the only place he feels safe."
     Maybe she was right. I let things slide. I let him lead his ever-growing legion of merry pranksters over the fence and into my yard where he would impress them with his daily deeds of destruction. I let him lead them to the mulberry tree, to the parsley, to the anise hyssop and all around. Sometimes I watched from the window, surreptitiously kneeling in the living room while he gathered mulberries and shared with the others. I liked to think that he was teaching some of them what I had taught him. I didn't hide because I needed space or time. I hid because I was once a kid. I hid because my intrusion would have changed the journey…because I remembered running through fields and down to creeks and picking boysenberries and mint. I remember squishing tadpoles in my hand and denying Frogdom.
     Javante has not climbed the fence once in the three months since Miss Treecie yelled at me. I have seen him on the street, walking with his mom, and when he sees me there is a look of recognition, the beginning of a smile, but then he holds his lips, level, horizontal, as if I no longer represent whatever it was I once represented.
     I yelled at Javante once. He didn't see me, but I saw him. I saw him launch a brick at a laying hen, and I saw that hen leave her eggs. I walked right in front of him, so close that he could not move, and I said, "That is not okay!" I said, "Go home. Now!" And he obeyed. He climbed the fence without warning.
     This did not dissuade him from climbing onto my side of the fence or from playing a game where he would see me working, would turn, wait, look at me as though I was supposed to chase him, and then bolt for the fence at any move I made in his direction. This did not stop him from asking me if I was going to have a birthday party for him when he turned eight. It did not stop his helping me plant okra seeds or lay down wood chips.
     What stopped all of this was the day I poked my head over, the day I saw Cash's lady, the day she asked me if I really knew what happened to their dog. What stopped all of this was truth. A truth so deep that Javante's addicted mother feared she would lose one of the only things she had left. I don't know how to change this. I don't know that anything needs to be changed. I do know this: Tomorrow is Halloween, and I miss Javante.

Epilogue: Javante was dressed as Batman. His sister, Kevyon, was a princess. Treecie didn't dress up, but her mom, Miss Lisa, was a witch. Then there were two itty bitty kids I didn't even know. I told the kids, "Two pieces each." They obeyed. Miss Lisa took six pieces, and then yelled Motherfucker at a man driving the wrong way down a one way street.

   

A letter to Emily Badger at the Washington Post, regarding: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/16/the-deeper-problems-we-miss-when-we-jeer-gentrification/

My neighborhood in New Orleans is on the wrong side of St. Claude. The Bywater, where everything has been bought up and where the residents have become predominantly white is called the riverside because of its proximity to the Mississippi. People have taken to calling the area where I live the HOMI-cide. I do not hear people in my neighborhood calling it this. I hear it from the people eating wine and cheese next to the river. I hear it from people that live in more affluent neighborhoods.

Where I see the problem is in generalization, in blanket statements like these, in a place not deemed safe until everyone you pass looks the same as you and nobody is screaming on the corner. 

I am white. 

This neighborhood that was once all black is now around 70/30 or 60/40. I saved my money to buy this house with a lot beside it where I could grow vegetables and solicit the help of my neighbors. I thought that this community would help me to build a garden. What I found instead is that this garden that I built with help from a few would help me to build community. 

I rented another lot from the city, one block over on France Street where the people sell dope, day in and day out, and what the guy I was working with wanted to do was to put up a camera and chain up the garden. Mine not yours. What I wanted to do was to get the very people that everyone was afraid of involved.

Kids in neighborhoods like these are subject to bars and beatings from the earliest age. Take a kindergartner who does not return a library book. Describe the offender. White: forgetful. Black: thief. Graham Greene once wrote that if you want people to be trustworthy, put trust in them. 

It has been slow going, almost a year now. People still ran their deals and ran up and down the street. They also tasted the bounty. Twin told me about growing up in Mississippi and how the waste from the house would feed what was in the fields. Cabbages big as your head. Miss Joo Ann had a mom in Chicago that had once grown basil in the 9^th ward. And almost everybody had a grandpa used to have mirlitons climbing on his fence.  

Twin was there to help fill the first box with soil. Before he went to jail, Larry wouldn’t let anybody else mow. He would take a break from running in and out of the abandoned house next door to mow the whole lot. And he didn’t even want a beer. He drank cold drinks. Quinn did what teenage kids in need of shiny shoes do on France Street, but he also started a garden of his own next to the house where his family lived.

I started to love these people. 

Day after day we built boxes with wood found in dumpsters of houses torn down all over New Orleans. We made compost and brought in soil. I never asked anyone to help. Though I did have to tell Quinn he could not work with us during school hours. Different people pitched in on different days. The same game that had always been played still got played, only the faces of the participants changed when the police came and took some of them.

I lost some tools, but the losses were the anomaly. Mostly, it was, Mr. Zach, you left your hammer and then when I said "can't nobody call me Mr. Zach unless they're under ten," they laughed.

The guys all kept telling me, "We need to build a table under that pear tree where we can sit. Won’t be no drug selling. It’s hot out here." After weeks and months of this, I let go of my fear. The ones who thrive on label would say: Junkies and dealers and killers gathered around. Demetrius and Deandre told me they would meet me the next morning at 8. 

I was ten minutes late. They were already waiting. We ran electricity from the neighbor, Mr. EJ. I am not a carpenter. I told them I didn’t know exactly what I was doing. I left twice, left my saw and drills and extensions cords and more to go home and get a level, a tape measure. Left it all with the dirty business still going on in the street.

When people came by, trying to do their dirty deals, Deandre would shout out, "Get out a here unless you wanna work. We helping the community." An older woman who came to sit down and have a beer before going to work said, “Y’all nigger rigging that shit."

And that's what we were doing, me and Deandre and Demetrius. We didn’t have all the right tools. Hell, we didn’t even have a plan, but after three hours or so, we had us a bench. Deandre said, "I'm proud of myself. Sometimes I wish I could work." I knew what he meant, that he was getting some kind of disability check and if he worked it would be taken away. 

"What's wrong with you?" I asked.

"I got a bullet living in my leg. It's been there since '95. Really been bothering me these days."

I sat down on the bench and told him and the others that it wasn't pretty, but it was gonna work.

The tenth anniversary of Katrina is coming on August 29th. There will be a group of volunteers coming to help CRISP Farms. My guess is that they will be mostly white. What I want is for them to work with the men they see as thugs, for them to see them as men.

Too often, I think the white man goes into a place with the best of intentions. He has a desire to save. It is not a bad motivation. What he does not know is that these very people he is trying to save have already been saved. Nothing is wrong. These men I know want the same thing that we all want: not to suffer. That's it. That’s all that any of us want.

When you let people be a part of the change that is taking place in their community, you will have reached them. This I believe. It may be only for a day, only for a moment, but that story will last, that story will go on as long as someone new sits down on the bench next to Deandre and pulls out a dollar for dominoes. 

Deandre will say, "I built this bench." And maybe, just maybe, he'll say, "We built this bench."

A Country Chicken is No Different Than a City Chicken If Your Perception is Right

I drove a tractor today. I loaded hay and delivered fifty-five gallon drums of water across red Georgia clay to seedlings recently planted.

            Nobody taught me that what we did when growing up—my father a salesman and my mother a stay-at-home in the city of Cedar Falls, Iowa—was any better than the cousins we never saw, the ones who spent their childhoods raising pigs and growing the biggest ear of corn they could in order to impress whoever was in charge of the future farmers of America. The FFA had their sticker stamped on each and every Iowa Hawkeye football helmet. I’m not sure what I thought of that or if I even thought of it at all.

            It hurts for me to realize that day after day after my grandma’s death I grow to appreciate her more. For her simplicity in what she ate which was always based on what she grew, and maybe looking back makes me more romantic, but I do feel as if there was someone there all along, teaching me without saying anything. Each stroll down her basement stairs, past shelves of mason jars of tomatoes and beans and beets and pickles and apples and apple sauce brings us closer together. When I was a kid, not yet old enough to be trusted to open the refrigerator without greasing up the stainless steel door, those jars were mysteries on the scale of what might be found in a scientist’s laboratory. The jars came to represent what they were: remnants of a distant past, an old world connection with what came from the earth. In other words, not cool. There were no toys hidden beneath these blobs of color. No chance of overdosing on chemically altered flavors like the lemonheads and peanut butter cups and cool ranch Doritos I craved.

            I appreciated only the visual. It took many years before I was able to begin to understand what went into each jar.

            I now have my own urban farm, an oasis in the 9^th ward of New Orleans, smack dab in the middle of Heroin Central and getting closer as we expand into adjacent lots. I wake to indiscerning roosters—sometimes their crows begin before the sun comes up, waving home the late night bar crawlers, waving on the restless crackheads strolling around the block, waving on the morning newspaper man, waving on the barges blowing blocks away.

            Morning is different in Georgia. There is mist and silence on this low lying field. I feel far from any guns, with no worries about the water cans being stolen or a woman dying on the curb in front of me with a needle in her arm while I gently water each seedling.

            Farmer Ben’s chickens have been fed. They know their place. They have everything they need. In addition to the feed received each morning, these chickens get gifts of the vegetables that don’t make it to market—cracked cantaloupes and tomatoes and watermelons give their eggs a dark orange hue. There is a kinship between man and chicken, a symbiotic relationship that extends past these creatures and back to the land.

            The 9^th ward chickens are leftovers, refugees forgotten after a flood, scavengers that nobody cares for. They subsist on paint chips and chicken bones. They eat the seedlings we plant and tear through raised beds like anarchist bikers leaving ruts behind.

            It will be months before the truth of what I am doing hits me, before I realize that I have been trying to force the very nature I praise to work for me. It will be months before I realize that these creatures I once saw as the bane of my existence have been my willing assistants all along. I believed them to be my enemy. I racked my brain with ways to keep them away from what I started. All the while, they worked without complaint. At the break of dawn, the roosters rounded up the crews. The laborers turned the wood chips I spread and sacrificed their own waste to help these break down. They turned dirt into soil. They could see further than sixty days or ninety days or however long an annual takes.

            It has taken years for me to slow down and let what lives live and let what dies die. Death feeds life. It is happening all around us. 

Safe Sex

Javante's mom is either Tina or Tracie or Tess or some other name that begins with "T". His grandma is called Miss Lisa, and mom and daughter fight like cats and chickens, calling each other whores and saying my man this and your man that and so on. Miss Lisa told my fiance, the first time the two of them met, that she better keep an eye on me 'cause Miss Lisa want to bite my dick. She said all the neighborhood women want to bite my dick.

     Javante was doing penance for throwing a rock through Michael's window. Michael is a former teacher and one of the guys who helps around CRISP Farms in the 9th Ward. He was the one that offered Javante the experience and saved him two hundred dollars. Javante would be responsible for helping the two of us plant peppers and okra.
     Javante's favorite part about planting was the break between each plant that gave him time to hang upside down on the gate that had no chain link and served no purpose other than a false barrier. It was a perfect size for an eight year old to hang and swing.

     The world must have been upside down to him. I didn't try to force too much. If he helped, he helped. He asked me did my lectricity get turned off, because his mama's lectricity got turned off, but his grandma's lectricty still worked, so they was staying by her.
     I told him I wasn't sure.

     "You gonna give me a dollar when we finished," he said.

     "We're saving you two hundred dollars," Michael said. 

     "What you need a dollar for?" I asked.

     "Something from the store."

     He had already eaten six or eight leaves of curly kale and red Russian kale, and even jammed an entire bunch of crisp mint lettuce into his mouth, but that he chewed and stood with his mouth open, green saliva, and green bits all around his pink tongue, and through this mess, he asked, "This is good?"

     "Is it bitter?" Michael asked.

     Javante nodded his head. We told him that he could spit it out. 

     He bent down before me while I planted okra. I had him water each hole. Then I taught him stem and leaf and the difference between the two. It took a few times of my pointing for him to go from leaf-leaf-leaf-leaf to leaf-leaf-leaf-leaf...I mean stem. I felt it was a success.

     Kids can only pay attention for so long, and it was clear that Javante had other important things to do, so Michael and I planted Scotch bonnets, jalapenos, cayennes, sweet reds, and banana peppers. At one point, I turned to see Javante sitting on the back of my truck, blowing up a balloon that kept getting bigger and bigger until it rivaled the Goodyear blimp from a distance. As I investigated the capacity of this amazing balloon, I realized that it was a condom. 

     I asked Javante, "Where'd you get that balloon?"

     "This not a balloon," he said. "It's a condom."

     "Where you got that condom?"

     "At the barber shop. I got it for free."

     Javante tied up the condom balloon and hit my truck with it. He hit the condom balloon against his chest and against his knees and stood in the back of my truck, condom balloon raised high like David about to slay Goliath. 

     Biting ants attacked my feet. I swatted them away.

     "Look," Javante yelled. "It's flying. It's flying."

     The condom rose with Javante's seemingly helium breath, higher into the sky, toward France Street and all the heroin dealers milling about. The three of us watched like it was a hot air balloon about to land on the moon. The ascension of this condom balloon made Javante's day, so much so that when the condom balloon hit Mr. Jackson's pine and popped so quick you almost heard a hiss, and then hung on the bristles with a lifelessness that defied it's former majesty, Javante did not even seem phased. Maybe, just maybe, he had three more condom balloons in his pocket, and if not, there would always be another trip to the barber.