It’s Just the Beginning
14 years sober today. Brent calls to wish me happy birthday and says that he reads this blog everyday. This surprised me. He says that it is one of his favorite things on the internet, that I took words from his head when I once said that trees have a great wisdom that we can feel if we stand close enough. He told me the glory of walking through the woods and finding dewberries.
I told him that this is not a pipe dream, to have fruit growing on every street in the middle of the city. If Helena Moreno will stand up to Entergy to keep my other friend making ice cream what might she think of fruit on every street? I imagine a place where kids show other kids from different neighborhoods just what can and cannot be eaten, where they know the names of the birds and the bugs.
I have a hard time not killing mosquitoes. I remember sitting beneath a pomegranate tree and looking at the pond some years ago, how I tried to tell myself that this meditation, that this mosquito, that my blood were all part of a circular system that fed the purple martin whose droppings fed millions of billions of organisms.
There have been other times like this. When I thought mind, or presence of mind, or the watcher could overcome current circumstances.
My teeth drilled into without novocaine in Korea.
In that dentist chair I tried to tell myself that pain is a thought. This did not make the pain go away. This made me clench my fist and grimace and try harder to push away the pain.
There was another time that popped up before the Korean scene, but this has escaped my mind, and what is here right now is the idea of listening to what is beyond and yet within, to the source from which all flows. This could be likened to sitting with another person who is speaking, and when thoughts pop up, rather than holding tight to these, letting them go, and being present in their moment. To have what is called compassion.
Nasim told me that love is having the most compassion for somebody. The way I see a dragonfly and think she is doing exactly what she should be doing, that she needs no input from me, that she will come and eat the mosquitoes, that her eggs live with their eggs.
There is a feeling that comes with having something to say, what Orwell might call the satisfaction of the ego, but there is another feeling that comes. Saying something requires a search. Saying something requires me to go within and see what is buried there, in that moment, in the presence of slapping mosquitoes, in the way what I'd thought earlier has now come back.
My friend Walter has poison ivy tattooed on his arm. If you ask him why, he will tell you, “I never want to get that shit on me again.”
And I remember telling myself, driving from Iowa to New Orleans barefoot because of the blisters and streaks and the itchiness, that it was all in my head, that the itch would go away, with or without scratching. Much as the craving for a cigarette.
I pulled at my skin in St. Louis. I scratched myself raw at a park in Memphis.
What does any of this have to do with growing, with the earth, with the idea of healing yourself?
I could force a metaphor, make meaning where there is none, but this is what has come. This is the gift that was once honored and called the muse. This is what people spoke of when congratulated for what they had written.
Sometimes silver streaks puffy pink clouds in a manner indescribable and sometimes blood flows from swollen feet.
And sometimes unity comes. In the same way I told Brent this morning, how I, who have always feared death, have felt acceptance only in old growth forests, where trees grow out of fallen tree stumps, where the smell is the essence of everything I know, where, on multiple occasions, I have thought that I could lie down, be without mind, be beyond, and become a part of the forest floor–or rather, finally realize, I am already a part of the forest floor.
And so I ask, how do I get in company with this realization, and witness this from now until my last breath?
