Relax and release
Why I ever had the idea that I might collect and reuse and take what others throw away to make something, I do not know. I admire those like Rauschenberg who seem able to collect what is around them, put all of this together, and then share the finished product in a manner that makes people want to keep looking.
I nearly got buried beneath a mountain of bike rims because all I could see was a pergola with passion flower vines and somehow the vision of this future construction blocked the reality of the pile that stacked higher and higher along my back fence.
It hurts for me to throw things away, to walk past waste, to see people so casually buy what will not last. I read recently that the famous chef who killed himself could not stand the amount of food that went into the trash. Perhaps that’s why Anthony Bourdain traveled the world to find those who used not only every animal and plant but every part of every animal and plant.
Sometimes it takes a woman’s touch to alert a man to the fact that the art he has collected is junk, that the space around him may represent the space inside his head. In this truth, the physical represents the mental. It’s why we’re drawn to lines and wide open spaces with clear vision. It’s why I finally took to the jungle, why I look out my back window and am actually able to consider how birds make nests.
Have you seen the way a blue jay violently tugs at the dead but still intact twig of a jujube? Or the way a mockingbird examines a strip of tape to determine whether or not this might be suitable for the base where she will raise her babies?
By clearing, I get to see birds build homes. I get to remember the two ducks and their nest under the deck and how they would flap above a kiddie pool in the middle of my backyard. I get to consider how to trim the lower branches, how I now grow my own compost, how each cutting is another gift to the land, how the edges are where the magic happens.
I like to see my girlfriend dance. I like when she wears my clothes, when she comes outside covered from neck to toe to avoid the trappings of the mosquito.
I like the way she asks me, “Are you greedy? Did you really need this many?”
I’m not sure. I wonder if all hoarding starts with innocence, with a desire to make something out of nothing. Maybe for some this is a need to hold onto what has become meaningful. For me, it was a promise of the future. The idea that when…that if…that someday…
And is this not the very struggle that the mind constructs in order to always be busy, to always be working?
I must have had two hundred bike rims. I wondered whether the dump would even take them, for they were not really building materials and I did not think there would be a form for me to fill out my desired intentions in collecting them. I did not think that the scrap metal people would accept so many different shapes and sizes, some aluminum and some steel, some still with rubber on the rim.
Sometimes the simplest interactions can lead to a change in the day. I lied, you know. I told the guy at the scrap metal pile a lie.
I said, “I was planning to build a big pergola where vines and flowers could grow.” That was the true part. Then I told him, “My girl said it’s the rims or me.”
“Looks like you made the right choice,” he said, even though he may have been an amateur hoarder with his own pile beside the mountain of scrap. In the place where he sat, there existed his own little collection: a weather vane shaped like a golfer, a blue metal table from the fifties, a three-wheeled bicycle and more that he had saved from the big old heap. That he had saved from becoming something else.
I throw away and still there is the desire to gather. Perhaps because there is no away.
At least I know that what I gave will be melted and will become something else. At least I know that those two truckloads of metal turned into sixty American dollars, turned into a wagyu burger, a fish flatbread, a buffalo tofu cauliflower salad, and an egg sandwich from Sneaky Pickle. At least I know that both my mind and my yard are a little bit clearer.
