Alchemy?
Kensington Market
Can alchemy describe more than just metals? Could this concept be used to understand my fascination with the way death breaks down and becomes life once again, the way I walk through cities and see what might be cut into pieces and stacked atop each other, the way leaves gather against a curve and the rushing flow of a day’s rain turns this into dirt, the way two apple cores sit on a stone wall as if the eaters knew birds might come, or as if the eaters were just negligent bankers out on a rushed lunch break.
A man told me the other day that I should get some land in the country and plant everything I want out there. In a way, this appeals to me, and in a way this would take away the exploration of the city. The countryside works fine on her own. She does not need me. None of nature needs me, really, but in the same manner that big factories ruin rivers, so, too, do people in cities create the cancers that destroy them when trying to make nature conform to their own whims.
What I wish to do is be an example. To take what may otherwise go wasted and find a place for this, to reconnect those separated from the dirt.
A recent revelation has shown me that while my giving of unsolicited advice has mostly ceased, I try to foist the notion of being connected to the earth upon those I love. I consider that everybody will have the same spiritual experience I had and am having. And I still believe this to be true.
How much might be lost? How much goes unseen in the rush from tram to taxi to glass walled glass ceilings? Yesterday we saw a car in Kensington market. I like to imagine the car sat for months, that leaves and bird droppings and takeout menus fell into the space between windshield and hood, that a seed then rose up and reached her roots into the engine. This is what life will do. Somebody then decided that this car would become a planter, and in the back they removed the lid of the trunk. Is it called a lid? That’s two questions now, alchemy and trunk lid.
You can rewire your brain, heal the way neural pathways travel. Whether this is the proper terminology, I’m not sure. A third consideration this morning. Instead of I don’t know there becomes the thought that I get to learn. Instead of fear and trepidation we get to approach the upcoming moments and days with curiosity and wonder. This is the place the Lord hath made.
Those words could have come from Catholic school upbringing, from church on Sundays, or from the way any resentment I had toward religion has gone, for I hear the word Lord and know that this means everything, and the Lord is not some holy bearded man with a staff in his right hand but rather an energy that passes and flows through everything and all, a Soul with a capital S if you will, and this soul knows only love. It is the personality that delves in fear and all that comes with this.
And maybe, in that trunk of that car, in Kensington market, outside of the shop where a quart of strawberries cost a dollar, there is alchemy happening, and my thoughts are a part of that alchemy, and the tiger breasted bird in the branches of the tree with the purple berries, maybe she is a part of this, too, and maybe the people who pass, those who watch Nasim and me eat the berries, maybe they have thoughts of how many times they have walked without knowing of this food, and maybe, the dandelion growing in the crack of this sidewalk has a comment for the conversation, too, and maybe, just maybe, alchemy is all around us, all of the time, if alchemy is indeed the proper terminology. And if not, then alchemy is still a part of the conversation for which I have not yet found the word.
