Fascinated Anthropologist
In this there exists the entire universe
Maybe I can help you to better understand me, to know why I love what I love and do what I do. In my best moments, the world is a verb. Nothing is static.
When I walk down the sidewalk on Freret Street, I see what may look to some like a discarded piece of concrete, out of place, dumped in the middle of a planter that has been made by cutting a perfect square into the sidewalk.
I want to look closer. I like to see the stones inside the concrete, those that have been rounded by water or by moving quickly through a sort of machine that shapes them that way. I see in the concrete the hands of a man, the hands of men, actually, who took shovels and mixed these rocks after mixing the concrete.
I look closer and see space, a rectangle, a spot where a one by two board once sat, encased by wet concrete that then dried, and at some time broken, old enough that the wood was either eaten or rotted away once the space where the concrete held the board was broken up.
When I walk I do not see abandoned branches and leaves and logs. I see soil in its infancy. I see life. I see the breaking down of what was once alive. I see art. I see impermanence.
I heard Paul Stamets, the great understander of mushrooms talk about the intelligence that underlies these systems, how scientists in Japan took slime mold and then took the connections of the underground railway system and made a map onto which they put small pieces of slime mold at varied intervals and then watched the way these connected, and how, in many cases, the slime mold moved and formed relationships with greater precision and efficiency then had these grand engineers.
There is to me an intelligence in seeing the world as something that is always moving, in using what might otherwise go unnoticed, This energy that exists in a pile of discarded bricks is beyond clay and sun. What seems an abandoned pile on the side of Tchoupitoulas Street has origins in Egypt or Mesopotamia or somewhere even further back in Asia where man first realized that the earth was kin.
And so I collected some of these bricks, to build the wall of the corner project higher, and I drove past the garden that Charlie built over at the school on Valence. I thought how much I have been taught by the earth beneath my feet. I thought how what once seemed a way to eat healthy vegetables has become so much more, has become a reverence. Is sacred.
And so, today, when I build this wall higher I am paying homage to the hands and hearts that exist within every one of us. This vision is available. This is why a butterfly means so much. We are born of the same earth. We return to the same earth.
The bible talks a lot about flesh and though I have not read much of the bible, I know what they mean–they’re referencing the ego, the thought life, the need to figure things out.
In vision, there comes a greater awareness, a seeing beyond what is there.
We create division, and here I don't mean separation or the mind trying to categorize. I mean edges. I mean the way that one space leads into another so that our minds feel more at ease. There needs to be a sense of releasing the clutter, of an order that is not control, of seeing our hand in all we have encountered. There needs to be a watching, a witness, a knowledge that interactions we never could have imagined will take place.
My job, our job, is to be open to this, to continue exploring, to continue learning. And sometimes the most honest prayer there is involves the knowing that a discarded piece of concrete is everything.
