Evolution

Dwarf tamarillo and sunflower in the heat of June

Walk outside. Look to the sky. Look all around. Let what lives teach you about change. Be the witness of all that is given. Then consider how you fit within this. Ask. Honor. Walk up to the tree who is your brother and say, “My friend, you have been here longer than me, will be here long after me.Help me to see what all of this is about.”

The house where I live chose me. Told me that the cypress across the street would be there everyday during sunrise and I knew that I might grow in these lots around the house. I did not know then how this would unfold. What started as boxes from wood scavenged from dumpsters and soil trucked in from Sugarland became something more. This became a place where dwarf tamarillo went wild. This became a place where papaya stretched far above my roof. This became the place where I ate my first paw paw.

Some of the teachers at my old school would say, “That boy smelling himself.” Meaning he’s getting too big for his britches. Meaning he really thinks he’s something. Here I sit smelling myself after a few days of doubt. I smell what felt like disappointment after the pergola came crashing down. Maybe this sweat is regret leaving my body, to remind me how I sometimes forget that not much of anything lived on this land nine years ago.

Time is a strange bird. In some ways I want the fruits of time to speed up that I might receive more of the bounty of what I have grown. And in some ways, I want time to slow down that I might savor love and journeys and learning and the presence that comes with a violin.

Time and space. Relations. How to love? 

A black beetle crawled out from the sissoo spinach outside the back door. I gathered him in my hand and said, “Chook chook,” for that is how I call the feral chickens of Lesseps and France Street.. None came. And so for the old beetle, it was his lucky day.

I considered a box where I might keep such bugs, where I might let them collect for a few days and then holler the loudest chook chook I ever hollered. And then I thought how that black beetle deserves his chance, how my interference is just that, how the answer is more sissoo, enough for everybody, how balance comes the more that is grown.

I once sat at the kitchen table removing the gelatinous coating from pomegranate seeds. I was reading a lot of Tony Parsons at the time. As I dried one of the seeds, something hit me. I was not doing any of this. The desire to plant the seeds came from the pomegranate tree I first saw by Nick Caldarera’s house in Lakeview. It was the desire of the pomegranate to spread, the desire to become something, and now, there are pomegranate trees, progeny of Lakeview, growing strong in the 9th Ward, around my block, and I can safely say, they were not planted by me.