Becoming

I try to say yes. I try to make paths. Xavier students were supposed to come today and learn about what I do. I was supposed to learn about what they do. Then last night everything changed. Instead there would be a group brought by a pastor. 

Nobody came. 

I brought seedlings to the shade covered hoop house instead. To clear the grounds a little. To make spots for sitting. To clear my head. To know what I have and don’t have.

Nasim said that instead of saying, “I am trying,” that we might go with “I am becoming.” For example, “I am becoming a business owner. I am becoming somebody who will manage employees. I am becoming wealthy doing what I love.” This fits with the Dispenza that I have been reading lately. I reach out and communicate with the quantum mind, with the me that has less worries, with the me that perhaps still confuses idioms.

Is it an idiom? Stubborn as a mule? It doesn’t matter really for I confused it with stubborn as a goat. At least that’s what I said to the woman on Japonica who pointed at a fence that borders an art collective and a lot of restored Airstream trailers.

“They’re over here,” she said.

I approached the goats. I don’t know their names. I don’t even know if they have names. I know that whenever I named chickens they seemed to die within weeks.

“Come on, guys.” I don’t even know if they’re guys.

If I'm the one going to be interacting with these goats on the regular, I should get to know more about them. No wonder they don’t want to come to me. 

I played sweet so as not to scare the artists. I know about the sensitivity of those sorts. I know my own sensitivity. I patted the sides of the bigger goat and clandestinely grabbed a horn.

“You’re a good boy.” 

He didn’t buck too much. Didn’t even really whinny. Not whinny. I think it’s a different word, one that starts with a b, but I can’t be sure.

The smaller of the two goats followed. He even jumped a bit. You ever see these goats jump and kick up their back legs? In a strange way, they remind me of the day I sat over at a school on Leonidas while TI and Lil Wayne shot a video. The Weezy did his own sort of jumping. A 180 on his skateboard. A move that could have also been done on a bench. Or a two by six.

I thanked the goats for going back inside the fence. I asked them to keep the chickens out of the shadehouse where some had pulled my seedlings up within minutes of my setting them down. 

I am becoming a business owner, and to become this I will ask questions. I will talk to the man at whose house I sat last night in Hahnville, overlooking a field of cows. This a house built on fried chicken sandwiches. This a house built on hustle and grit. This a house built by a man who would puke out my passenger’s window with courtesy when he couldn’t get his fix ten years ago. 

We lived together for a time. It was before I knew Dude the Pig. The chicken man and me, we got what was left from a place on St. Charles and Louisiana called Fresh Market. Mushrooms and blueberries and enough damn tomatoes to take over Sicily. And we cooked and we shared, and he was on his way, and nobody thought he would stay away from the needle, but some years later he did.

His hard work lifted an entire family. He married. He had a child. Now he can sit and watch cows wander in the sunset. He can sit and talk to me about how to become the best businessman I can be, this man I made sleep on my porch in the 9th Ward at one time because I did not trust him in my house. This same man had thoughts of killing a drug dealer with his own gun and somehow burying his body under the raised kitchen where we kept all the fresh market compost we did not eat. 

I have learned that I cannot predict what will happen or how. This does not mean that I cannot believe. Quite the opposite, really. For the possibilities of the future are endless. The possibilities of the future also exist in the present. So when I take all the joy I think success will bring and harvest that joy in the moment, I can do anything.