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Who put this here?

Yesterday was six years since my dad took his last breath. I was with him in the dining room. I think how cold his feet got. I think how he moaned when my sister said the grandkids were there. I think of touching his neck for the last time. I remember how he always told me that nothing worth doing is easy.

Yesterday my friend Adell took her last breath. She would answer my calls when I was afraid and confused. She taught me what it was like to be a woman and how I could be a better man. My first year of teaching I called her afraid. I said, “You don’t know what it’s like to look over a sea of thirty-five fourth graders.”

She said, “What if your only real job is to go and see the divine inside those children each day.”

Today I found a voodoo doll in what I like to call the orchard, the area of land where I don't go as often, the area of land that cops have walked through looking for suspects. I don’t know who the doll was for or why she sat on that bench. I know of no vendettas against me.

Still, while I swam, I wondered about my lungs. I wondered about the way thoughts can infect or heal. I thought about love and abundance and how I alternate these words with each breast stroke. Lately I've also included, “I am them. They are me.”

The voodoo doll brought disappointment that must have already been inside though was not present while I chased the goats back and forth, while they ran under the tables of the greenhouse. Even Dude’s constant chewing and his attempt to bite me did not send my thoughts spinning.

The voodoo doll did. The idea that the power comes not necessarily in the object but what the object represents, how the intended recipient becomes fixated on the doll. 

Nasim asked me what I might tell a friend who worked hard for two months and had a feeling of disappointment that not enough was coming. I told her that I would tell him that it was okay, that he was working hard, doing his best.

Then I said, “If I’m truthful, I’d be thinking, ‘stop being such a pussy.’”

“Maybe that’s how you talk to yourself,” she said. “The problem is that you’re judging yourself for feeling disappointed. You try to fix it.”

“I say that I should be stronger, that I’m more spiritual than this, that I shouldn’t be thinking this way.”

“And that’s a loop”

“The thoughts are in a constant cycle.”

“It’s okay to feel disappointed.”

The truth is that the natural reaction to hard work not culminating in the intended outcome is disappointment. There is nothing wrong with this. There is nothing wrong with sitting and asking what the disappointment feels like. It does not mean that a curse has been put on me. It does not mean that I’m doing anything wrong. It means that I live in New Orleans.

This path, these two months of writing, are a blueprint for all of the fear and disappointment that someone in the future might encounter while trying to become his best self.

Let’s look at what I see ten years from now. I will not be in a shaded hoophouse chasing goats or almost getting bit by a pig named Dude, unless I decide this as one of my many options for what to do that day. I will not be swatting mosquitoes while picking strawberry guava. The plants that I have now, the current varieties, will number in the thousands and I will be learning more and more each day. I’ll be eating pitangatuba and dozens of different varieties of guava and papaya. I will be the go to guy for tropical fruit.

I will drive to places where others have mastered the art of edible landscaping and we will share what we have learned with each other. The excitement will never cease and I will continue to write about what I love most, which is learning new things. 

Employees will dig and move mulch and sweat in the sun because, baby, I’ll have paid my dues, and the fruit that drips from all my projects will provide more and more seed. I will be a master grafter and a sought after presenter. I will be the same man I am today.

It’s hard to imagine how much my brain will have healed in ten years, considering what my brain was like ten years ago. 

Fear and worry won’t grow more fruit, but curiosity and wonder will.