Observation

It’s not the cold so much as the blowing wind that chills the plants to the cambium. This is the sweet spot, the marrow, the reason why humidity delivers a chill in New Orleans winter and sweat in the summer. Humidity is not picky.

This is an attempt to find my true voice, to surprise myself, to take all that I have learned and turn this into something. I wonder whether it is harder to write about myself or to make something up. I’ve got to say that it’s all made up, even when writing about self, for the memory of a memory is just that until it becomes a story.

So what if instead I could try my best to catch the present, to give you what is going on inside of me while I consider what is wanted. Is not this the source of business? Does not a shop that takes no regular inventory usually go broke?

Here’s what I have found out about myself recently. My desire to find something new, to succeed at growing what has never been grown before in New Orleans is a grasp at immortality. Nobody wants to die, even those that do. Deep inside, beneath every mask and each attempt to push others away is a spark of the divine. This spark exists inside everyone, and I would argue, everything.

This has always come out in me through the want to offer something new, through the notion of dance and music and sometimes you will hear from writing teachers that you need to choose the words and not let the words choose your journey, and I understand this. But what about the notion that the entire point of the journey is the journey? What might life be like if less of us focused on the destination? If we let the tune determine the dance.

Some might say that utter chaos would ensue. And some are right. For if there were no concern with destinations who would build rockets and twin engine planes? Who would design grocery carts and those large four-wheel wagons you can pull around nurseries? I know the necessity of goals and plans.

What I am saying is this…in the cold wind of Arabi in December, consider how bamboo bends. Consider a stick that is dead, in the same wind. And then consider something that you are not proficient in. For me, this is painting. I took a class or two in college, but I was stoned and often late, and mostly curious to see what the naked woman would look like.

So yesterday I sat with a brush and water and a cheap plastic divider that we got at Michael’s. I did not plan. I took paint and water to paper and let what happened tell me what was going to become. And in this the greens and blues and yellows came. Patience delivered in the form of trying to spread the water. 

Watch is the key word. In anything. Watch the thoughts. Watch the land. Watch the people. Observation is the key to better understanding, to knowing that my actions are not always happening for the reasons that the best of me wants to assume. Often the actions come from the small me, from the one that needs to be somebody, appreciated, recognized, witnessed and acknowledged.

But sometimes a circle on a paper becomes a head that I had not met moments before and then a neck becomes a body and a scarecrow hand reaches at dots made by tapping the paintbrush and you don’t know what these dots are and then you show the masterpiece to your wife who says that everything you do is a self portrait and you say what do you mean and she says, “That’s you. Planting seeds.”

Then you ask her what the image is on top and she says, “Those are the eggs that you eat to give you the energy to plant.”

One time I was given what I thought was a great compliment. There was a photo of me lying on the roof of my house in the Treme, a photo taken from the ground below. And another writer told me that this was how he imagined me writing. Watching. Taking everything in and then giving the world what I saw.

I’ll take this. I’ll even take this when the morning is cold and I go more in then out and I don't always know why I do what I do, but if my words can help one person to feel less alone, then maybe I have done my job.

And if a flower I plant brings one butterfly that brings one child that brings one smile then maybe in that, too, I have succeeded.

I would like to make big, overarching pronouncements, to know, to grip onto and give you certainty, but that is the booby prize and I don’t even have boobies.