Freak Cherry

My phone tells me that the temperature dropped to thirty-one degrees last night. For those of you in the rest of the world, this is right below freezing. One degree below, actually. And though I mean to make no statements about ethnocentrism, I think the notion has to be considered in the want to control and the need for plants to act in ways that we as human beings want them to.

In this we, I include myself. I consider the years I have tried to keep different plants growing, the seeds that I have collected over and over. I especially consider dwarf tamarillo. I consider the beginnings. I consider how many different plants I put into the ground too soon.

But this was intended to be a piece about cold, a piece about how I look out my window and see that the tithonia has not wilted. Yet. I see that the psidium robustum and the psidium myrtoides appear to have no damage at all. They even seem to like it. And I think maybe nothing has damage.

I do not want to look at the pigeon peas for fear that they have lost their flowers and fruit. I do not want to make my way to Needle Street and see what has happened to the hundreds of baby surinam cherries that shined an almost translucent green when I hit them with water yesterday afternoon.

There are deaths and rebirths. This is compost. This is the earth. And winter plays a part in this. And I play a part in wanting to prolong winter, maybe in wanting to prolong the point of what I am writing. Maybe I do not know the point of what I am writing. Was it Orwell who said that part of writing is the very act of determining what we have to say?

I wonder what the body knows. Inside the house the temperature is seventy. I wear pajamas. And yet there is a chill. A knee that once knew the bashing of a football helmet reminds me of how I should have listened when I was a kid. A back attacks me for not keeping up with those yoga stretches and bends.

I wonder how the plants feel right now. Do you know that they know when you’re coming? Do you know that they can feel anger? Am I doing them a disservice by trying to take that which may not naturally grow in this country of New Orleans and make it into something which does? Or am I simply the hand that helps along what might happen some other way. I wonder. And wonder is a great gift. Wonder is the other cheek of fear.

I consider one plant I have in the greenhouse. A surinam cherry. A eugenia uniflora. One of what I have dubbed the Cajun Creole Cherry. The label on this one says Frost Pitanga. Yet another name. Like Carl Weathers character in Rocky.

I call her Frost because one year we had multiple days in a row when the temperatures stayed in the twenties and it was after this period that I walked between my pond and the surinam cherry plant that I call Mother, and I saw a fruit hanging and I wondered how the hell Mother Nature allowed this. I then found a few more. And I planted these seeds. 

These freaks of nature are what creates something new. These freaks of nature are the reason why I will walk into the cold and look. They are the answer to Joseph Campbell. They are the caves I enter anyway. They are uncertainty, which is really everything, and maybe this is the true gift of knowing. And maybe this is God.

Uh oh. What? Well..You see…the word God has so much baggage and damage that it creates more separation than unity. What if God is simply the Great Reality, what exists, the magic of all that happens. But then the mind comes in and labels these things as good or bad and tries to nail down and categorize and demand certainty.

Well, my friends, this is not the ride that we are on. And plants teach us that and so does the winter and the problem often is that things die and others mutate and we as human beings look at this and think there is something that needs to be done. That’s the nature of the mind. The mind creates problems so that it has something to fix.

What we really have is a much greater gift than this. We have consciousness—beyond mind—and it is this consciousness that is able to watch, beneath the shivers, beyond the cold, when the weather dips below freezing, we are able to see, and sometimes, if we’re lucky enough, this consciousness merges with the object of consciousness and a big old freak cherry hangs and glistens and there is no description, no explanation, no separation. Nothing. There is a merging. A gift so much bigger than cold.