Dust of Life
In the chill of this June morning in Toronto, 19 floors above the park below, people and dogs look like big toys placed for my amusement, and on this balcony I know a February when no amount of clothes could protect us from King Street West, and I know the dinners we ate, the skins of onions and mangoes, the ends of green peppers, banana peels and egg shells and coffee grounds, the way we took all of this across the city in the freezing cold to the balcony where I now sit. The sacrifice it might take to be with a guy who thinks like this.
There is dust in this moment, adrift from constant construction perhaps, and in this dust there must be life. Bugs do not fly as high or bear witness to the angles and straight lines of glass skyscrapers created by the mind and hand of man, but up here, on this particular balcony, bugs do exist, for our memories brought these bugs.The bugs I can see inside the old water bottle communicate with the bugs none of us can see.
I’m always trying to bring life to the spaces from which it is absent, and this beginning, this brown sludge and slime needs some paper and maybe a few spoonfuls of soil from down by the lake where we ate purple berries we did not know while beside people we did not know who also ate the purple berries. We ate unripe apples, tiny little guys, and Nasim told me the story of zoghal akhteh (Cornelian cherries), how they sometimes put these in golpar. I picked anise hyssop and what must have been a bee balm to try my luck at cuttings.
There is something fascinating for me in knowing what grows, in sharing this, and in spreading what exists down by the lake where trees rise out of sidewalks, down by that water where geese careen above what looks like a miniature forest which stretches up toward the surface.
All of this was once black and white, what we know as earth. Then there was a big fire where the core boiled over like oatmeal. It rained for 12,000 years.
To consider all that has happened to lead to this moment creates a wonder that creates a joy that delivers me to right here and right now again and again. And to know that our hands have created life on a balcony where only dust lived is a precious gift. To know that every action changes the world is a great blessing.
To look below to the cyclists, to the dogs and to those walking the dogs, and to not know what this compost might become, to wonder, to consider how a journey to explore, to find, to see seeds of those purple berries poke through the surface 19 floors above the world, 19 floors above an unknown purpose, 19 floors with another 27 to reach the roof. And what a gift that we all get to exist within and try to respect all that God has given.
