Marinate
Squash from the gods
What to be said of those days where everything feels too much, where what I have gathered is kkae nip, a Korean leaf that some call perilla, but this is not perilla, not shiso either. This distinct taste is indescribable, a cross between licorice and basil, but even this does not do justice to the nostalgia of sitting around tables, of wrapping pork belly and fresh garlic and kim chi and bean paste into a big ball.
In a pot on the stove I mix vinegar and tamari and a bit of Korean red pepper flakes (they’re thicker) and add some honey at the end. Now this kkae nip sits. The juice flavors her and she flavors the juice.
A black beetle or sort of bug has gotten into the ripe brown turkey figs and I hope those little guys are happy for the have turned most to slime. The birds have taken the smaller purple figs, but there are more around the corner and there are more in my freezer.
How to beat time? Sit in the kitchen. Watch the bird feeder outside the window. Today this was my extent of being with nature. I thought rain would come for the phone said eighty percent. And I thought how nice it would be to be forced inside. Yet when the decision to stay inside is voluntary what comes is guilt. What comes is the idea that I should be doing more.
I write today because I made a commitment to write everyday. I write today because I do not know that there is something inside of me that might need to come out. I could express the joy of the way birds come in droves, of the way there are six different blue jays that hit the feeder, of the way they come one or two at a time, of the way sparrows gather by the dozen and these two genus battle for who deserves the seed from the hands of the concrete angel.
I could write that everything is okay for this is a truth I know even when it feels like it isn’t the case. I could write of questions that come with growing at different spaces, of the way I want to know, of the relationship between me and all that is alive.
In the stove is a squash nobody could have planned, plucked from a vine rose up from a pile of wood chips, dropped by a man who cuts down trees for a living. A bud that popped up from scraps dropped by a teacher. The seeds I saved to return to the same space after feeding some to the chicks that gather to collect what the blue jays knock from the feeder.
What if this bearing witness to what exists outside the window were enough? What if i was enough? What if the pause that comes is a holy moment to witness what is. The middle of July.
I want to hear rain outside the window. I want to see the green contentment that sometimes shines on leaves. I want to let go of the need to feel like I know things.
This is a bit of meandering, a road that started with confusion, words of how the outside might be seen. This is the way of growth, the way of birds fighting in midair, the way of producing even when there is no inspiration.
This could be what people do daily. This could be the fish in the pond that I cannot see. This could be the tree that fell during the hurricane. I could be a passenger in a car driven by God through the sky of an afternoon where nothing needs to be done. Or this could be the way my chest grows heavy with the first bite of squash, with the wonder at what else I might be able to eat, with the wonder at what I have said and whether any of it means anything.
If there be a sentence in these last paragraphs that I might come upon later, that I might realize is me trying to run from fear, that I see can lift me to another spot, then this time writing was worth it.
