Closed Door?

I got the boot today, oh boy, a lucky man to have been freed, to get to come closer to me, to get to look inside and see what stops me from creation, what blocks me from God. It wasn’t just the papaya taking bandit or never having met the principal that led to my feeling misunderstood. It was the idea of being a man who simply took care of a lot so that a business did not lose their land. There seemed to be no collaboration, and no interest in taking advantage of what I have to offer.

Days ago, I wrote about the idea of looking from afar versus looking from close up. I will tell you that my favorite photo ever taken in the garden shows a four year old holding a magnifying glass and perched about an orange calendula. In her curiosity lay the reason for every seed I ever planted. And my girlfriend said it best when she said that the school is not wrong, just that they think differently. 

I asked the new contact whether or not he could assure me that the thousands of dollars of plants that I put around the edges would be saved. He said he couldn’t. He said just to be safe I better dig them up. I spoke in a language I find that business people can understand, and even this did not have the effect of establishing value to what I had done, to what it was on its way to becoming. I told him he was a kind man for he was just the middleman and it must not be easy for him to deliver news like this.

Truth is, I felt free, released, no longer under the pressure of drenched pants by ten in the morning to make something that was not used. I had just had a vision yesterday, and thought how I’m often surprised how the right answers come after I watch without taking action, after i get a sense of what is growing and how.I saw the way the moringa rose from the box, the way the mulberry sat between, and I imagined a natural canopy over the boxes where the kids could look up, where birds would land and stake out their next move.

I know that land becomes more valuable, slowly slips away until there are only squares in sidewalks and strips between what we in New Orleans call the neutral ground. And perhaps this is a place where those with my ideas and those with other ideas can meet. Perhaps this is my life’s lesson, to find these people, to create something together, to know that nobody ever one hundred percent agrees with another.

When the man told me I had best get the plants, I considered what I might do, how i had seen that woman named butterfly sit in a tree while loggers or builders or some kind of tree smashing people came to claim that space. I thought of the cypress trees, 100 year old giants in the 1400 block of Lesseps, chopped and dropped six years ago to build three shotgun houses on two lots.

I drove to get a truckload of soil from a place on L and A Road, from a spot right next door to where I buy sacks of oysters. I thought of smashed shells and how our soil needs this calcium. I thought of pecan trees. Mostly I thought of making a video, a tour of what I had started, a tour of what will never be the same, an honor given, to the plants that tried to take root, to those just starting to produce fruit, to those relationships I would tear from the earth in the upcoming days.

Sometimes enough is a cello at five in the afternoon and watching my baby smile and play ukulele while I try to write what today has meant, while I try to see a lesson in everything, while I sometimes still struggle to accept what is, even after having been freed.