Bani Adam
I filled the birdbath today. You should have seen the way that blue jay played, a Mister on a mission without rain for five weeks, wings a flapping, hopping, spinning. Other jays and sparrows came to try to take his place, but this jay would have none of it. He was going to flap until every last bit of water splashed out from the iron sides.
I don’t know where the birdbath came from. There are a number of things in my yard with sources that I have forgotten. There are a number of things I’m collecting to send to the place where nothing grows, where big machines I wanted to drive as a child run back and forth, where big white birds dive down to the earth to get the bugs that live in the compacted wood. A broken shelf. A hobby horse. The top of a spool used by power companies.
In the act of clearing away there comes space for what might otherwise become stuck. Energy might be a source that does not sit. Energy is a gift. Energy is meant to be passed. I have held energy for too long. As if by taking what I have found I could hold onto permanence.
There is a way to give that spreads around the world. There is space where mine does not define where we walk. I wonder about this. Feathers I have collected. Sticks. The lifeless wings of a monarch butterfly.
I worked with PJ again today on the strip that runs along Marais, blocks away from me, a space where I now like to walk past, where zinnias have risen to explode with pink. PJ says this makes sense, to build life, to bring life, to be a part of the butterfly that lands, to understand what happens when dragonflies soar through the air, stuck together.
I showed him the moth that looks like paper airplanes I made in fourth grade, the moth with green and blue, shaped with a big nose to dive down quickly.
I said, “She lays her eggs on the lab lab beans and the caterpillars eat the leaves.”
“That’s bad,” he says.
“No,” I say. “That’s good.”
“You want them to eat the leaves?”
I tell him that I’m not a big fan of the word bad or the word good. As a matter of fact, I’m not that big of a fan of words at all. They’re a game, you know. Words. A way to play. A way to throw undercooked spaghetti at the wall and see if it will stick.
But in this instance I had to explain how they’re eating what we planted meant that we are on the way. I did not tell him that the gulf fritillary collected only pollen from the zinnia flowers, that we would need to plant some passion flower for her to lay her own eggs.
“So you’re like God,” he said. “Creating a world.”
“We’re all God.”
I didn’t say anymore. I wanted him to keep loading wood chips from the truck so that I might lay these atop green pigeon pea, tithonia, and dry leaves in an attempt to continue to foster the life we have brought.
I sit now and consider the word that means…reciprocal! That’s the word I am looking for. When we all realize that we are God, everything is reciprocal. Everything we do affects everything else. So my filling the birdbath brings joy and cool to the hot bird. His flapping brings me the same while I sit in my kitchen. I share this with you, and maybe you can imagine something you might have seen, and maybe later today, after reading this, you will go to as place where your heart spills without your permission.
The way I watched a man cry atop a mountain ridge because he had never seen the beauty of this. The way the sun turns so purple that the birds question the sky. The way the river seems to flow backwards when you stare long enough.
Take what you have painted and explore the reason why you mixed red with blue. This is beyond thought, beyond words, beyond the brush. There is something inside everyone of us, and that something is all of us.
