MYSTERY

I want to leave a path, a mystery for the children who pass. I look between branches and see flowers that I have never seen, flowers growing on bark. I see books and videos and microclimates and soil built year after year. I see a pond.

I remember the way Ahme looked at me when I explained how every fruit was once a flower and every flower once a seed and every seed once a flower and this cyclical unfolding meant more to her than the Frankenstein story we read in English class. I tried to explain how the good doctor got his understanding from a concept that is much the same, death becoming life and life becoming death.

You may wonder about a board and why all the bugs scatter when you turn this over. They are not ready. They are still life feeding on death. They do not know disturbance, but the earth does. The earth knows that to be disturbed means to send seeds through her skin in an attempt to calm that disturbance.

What led me to the branches at which I stare? When did I first hear about this? When did I put the bare root seedling into the ground? I want to go back through my past and keep track of that which has been forgotten. I want to grab hold of separate parts that have become one and know how these work together. Maybe there is more that I do not know, more to be seen. I know giving up is never the answer.

Many quit too early. I almost cut down a citrus tree that started in a compost pile in the backyard of a limousine driver in Midcity. Thank you, Kevin Korson. And thank you patience for the sweet pink I am able to slice in New Orleans winter, in the rain of the days after a drought, in the cold that knows portable heater and piano. These are the memories to keep track of, to sift, to deliver.

Sit in this room with me and see the starfruit hang from another tree I almost cut down. Maybe a hundred this winter. Maybe a way I could have taught Ahme math. Probability. Thousands of flowers. Purple. The reason we meditate. To see these.

It was in picking one of these fruits that I noticed what was an anomaly the first time I bore witness to its existence, to the white that you see growing on the branches, in the cold of November, in a microclimate, in a memory shipped from Florida some years ago. 

And in this mystery, I want you to know that you will find fruit. That I, too, had never seen anything like this before. And if you know, don’t say, don’t ruin the experience for the rest. Let them take the journey. Let them find the way a branch bears fruit. And in this cold November there is always room to grow.