Living Chips

“I told that dude he should get a support kitten or something. A dog. You can tell them anything.” Neighbor leans back, a visible pistol strapped to his waist. He’s talking about a guy stayed next door, a guy went through PTSD from the war and knelt on the porch crying. “I dealt with seizures. I know what to do there. Get them on their side. Make sure they don’t bite their tongue.”

He’s been next door for four years and his kids always been out front and around to welcome me home when I used to teach. Their sweet smiles always a welcome relief.

So much happened this day, from a sunrise up on the attic deck, high above the roof, to a sunset walking through the Quarter on Dauphine. I started the day thinking it was Wednesday and even admonished a guy who didn’t show up for our weekly Wednesday meeting. It’s Tuesday by the way. I also judged an accountant who did not show up for our zoom meeting.

Were it not for these errors I would not have been able to listen to Dispenza, to the week two meditation about becoming the new self, about letting go of the old self, to not go down the wormhole, but rather watch, like we sometimes say, the opportunity for the conscious mind to watch the unconscious, and maybe this is what some call God.

When the old self tries to jump in, a simple, “Change,” will do, a feeling of what is coming up in the body and then a reimagining of how you might like the future to look, and what might that feel like in the body.

Nasim talked about asking how best we might communicate, how best I might work with the canvas that is nature. And she asked how best God and I might communicate. Uh…collaborate, I mean.

So I cleared away the back driveway and pulled up cayratia Japonica, and in this pulled goji berry away from the surinam cherry, giant root sections that can be divided and made into other plants, and I know that pots surrounded by two by fours with bicycle rims are the way to go for these goji berries. 

My yard is a nursery. 

There is a poem in this. Or a poem I have read. There is a poem in the canvas on the Corner Project where Edgar decided he would like to upcycle tossed concrete, and I have decided to call the wood chips that I gather from the giant pile, those that have rotted down, Living Chips. And if I knew how to make the trademark symbol, I would do this. 

I appreciate Edgar and Julie letting me take that lead on what grows in their space and deferring to my expertise while making sure that some of what they want and what I know will work can be planted. 

Negative thoughts will never go away by trying to make them go away. They are like the humidity that collects on the other side of a leaf in the morning. They are there to serve, even though they may seem out of place. When I open to the world, to the new self, to the one who believes in his business, people are drawn to me.

In the middle of swimming, Christian asked me if I could come to his house and do a consultation. Then Will texted that he wanted some more work done.

Nasim tells me that I am like her grandma. She says this after smelling four o-clock somewhere in the Marigny, after which I take a small piece to root in the pot on my front porch. 

I’m like my grandma also, always growing, always seeing how plants work together. I have learned that some life best exists in a pot and know that these four o-clock are a fine example. 

Oh how the smell from blocks away. How a four-way stop in Farsi is called chahar rah How Farsi is not Islam, especially walking past an Islamic Center on St. Claude.

And the last thing I know, when I open the mind to the quantum field is to pay attention to what comes forth, even more than what I’ve written.

Jacob making an offer for me to use the greenhouse, a guy named Terrence from Sprout at the coffee shop and how he talked to me about my truck of living chips into which I dumped the coffee grounds.

And when the knees begin to strain, and a lunge won’t do, the quantum field calls forth my old Korean buddy Michael in a tuk tuk and he drives us all the way home to Lesseps, a block from where he lives. 

And the neighbor, he says, “I’m first on the list. Once you get more shipped from China. Imagine my kids riding in the back of that.”

“They’d love it,” I say. And so they would. And so we did.