God

Cassia and tithonia flowers

Here and there I’m right on time. To learn something new. To have an experience. To witness beauty. Sometimes all of these come together at once.

I plant cassia because the tree is leguminous and good for coppicing. New trees will grow from branches stuck into the ground. Many different kinds of bees hover around the yellow flowers and this tree is host to the yellow moth you know from your youth. The one with the belly that smears white onto your finger. The one with wings that drift dust.

What I didn't know was the relationship between the old fan tailed bird and this tree. 

I pulled into the back driveway where the cassia stretches above the fence after planting sixty plugs of gulf coast penstemon and sixty plugs of swamp mallow between Ron and Edgar’s houses. The life of both of these places has begun to change. Even the way the people stop by to admire the flowers and the butterflies.

One lady said, “I'm Kate. I live in the old bakery.” I don’t know where the old bakery was or how a lady ten or fifteen years older than me came here with her English accent and bought this place.

I said, “If you need work, let me know.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“If you’d like me to bring life to your space.”

“I have a big garden.”

I would have liked to have said that maybe I could come by and see her garden, that maybe she had some of what I didn't and maybe I had some of what she didn’t.

There’s another guy walked by. I believe his name is Ken. I know his house. Many plants growing. He said he might need to look me up and ask me some questions. I told him it’s been a matter of seeing what goes together.

“I know I don’t want those bananas,” he said. “It’s like logging. I’m too old. And I don’t want to pay anyone.”

I enjoy the work close to my house. It brings me closer to the people I don't know and in contact with some of those I don’t often see. 

When I see Ken and Kate next, I will tell them of what I witnessed in the back of my driveway, with the fan tailed bird. How she ducked her head and ate. I thought she must be getting bees or other bugs from the flowers. I know her fondness for the berries of the dwarf tamarillo. I looked closer. 

She plucked a yellow flower from the branch and chewed this up. She plucked another. She was eating the flowers. She must have been getting her protein.

I see more and more of those birds and the more that I work the more I encounter people. I sometimes wonder what they want when they stop. It’s interesting what some people say. 

One man told me, “Don’t work too hard.”

I wonder why he said that. Was there something in my mannerisms that indicated my present efforts to be too strenuous? Or was this something he said to everybody that he saw working. Maybe his own leisurely stroll on a Thursday afternoon was threatened by my work, and he wanted a companion, a willing partner to laze the day away and be with what was.

I could have stopped. I could have shown him. I might have answered some questions about planting. The way I did with Kate. The way when she asked me if what grew was edible I told her that first I meant to build the soil. I told her that I was putting down the natives. Some of this is both to eat and to chop and drop. 

“Like the moringa and the pigeon pea,” I told her.

I know there could be pigeon peas on every corner. I know that it would take a lot of effort to shell these for dinners, but there are cultures that do this. The Nepalese eat dhal bhat everyday. At least I did while I traveled with them. And we ate with our hands.

There is something that comes with being a part of the world around you, with knowing that you have helped the soil to come alive. This is why people stop. They don’t even know this, some of them, but they see the hand of God in me the same as I see the hand of God in them.

What if I continued to seek the hand of God, to love God, to serve the earth which is God. Which I’m God. Which you are God.

If you stop and see a moment, you will know that you too can have an experience like a bird eating yellow flowers in your back driveway on a Thursday. And to see this you need to slow down. Maybe even stop. Stand the way I did. But perhaps you’ll do better. Perhaps you won’t need to use your phone camera or write about it later. Perhaps you can let your moment fill your entire being with the realization that you are the bird and the flower and Ken and Kate. 

That you are the day.

That you are God.