Ring

Live from Needle Street

Research might tarnish my newly developed theory so before I go down that road, let me share what I’ve witnessed. A ring is only a circle until it is given meaning. A ring then becomes endowed with appreciation, wonder, and duty. For to hold this is to know the love of the other who wears your ring, to know that she too sees daily the commitment made.

I take off the ring to run a gas powered weed whacker and knock down growth so high the shards of plants shoot back at my glasses as I clear away paths and create a vision to see the plants that I have put in the ground. You know when I mowed as a child I always took joy in finding a mouse cut in half, in seeing toads jump from hidden spots, in butterflies and big black bees rising.

There is something about cutting away, about taking a step back to see the progress of what I have planted. I have been thinking a lot about what I like to call the front end. An end that I never considered. All the work that in the moment seems to be drudgery, that seems to have gotten nowhere and yet when I whack away the bidens alba, taking the homes from the bees I’m better able to see the ten foot tall pomegranate trees that I started from seed years ago.

I have a hard time because I know that every spin of the weedwhack string changes the entire universe and I don't know that I’m equipped to handle power like this. I’m better left with the task of continuing to watch. But there is in this watching an entanglement that is hard to appreciate. I do not see my hand in making something happen. I do not see that I am a part of all that grows. To be frank, sometimes I only see the same scatter that often exists inside my head. The weed whacker allows a step back, allows a pause.

The same happens with the ring. 

Did you know that if you swim for ten months straight your finger will get skinnier. Likely all of your fingers, but I only know of the one. On the hand where I tried on this ring in Nepal almost a year before I put it on again. 

I lose everything. Some might see this as a gift, the unforced ability that leads to the dissolution of attachment. I don’t believe some master plan made it like this. In fact, too often my loss probably comes as a result of the business inside my head.

I do not want to lose this ring. The ring represents love. The ring represents getting into a plane each day, jumping into the sky, and hoping the parachute opens. The ring helps me to remember that we can get through anything. So when I swim. When I weed whack, sometimes even when I wash dishes, I take off this ring. I don’t consider the absence during the aforementioned tasks. Perhaps this is because I’ve only been wearing this ring for three weeks.

When I come back to the ring after my time away there is something akin to restating my vows. It is as if with each slip onto the finger I get the opportunity to once again express and remember my love.

I’d rather wear the ring always. I’d rather let everything grow up together and become a vining living and dying canopy. Both notions have their value.

So I try to consider how to tie all of this together, how to explain that sometimes it is the absence that helps me to know the presence. There is more to see about this, something beyond just the lack of duality, and it is as if I have my finger right there, almost on the tip, almost ready, and yet, all the finger can do it point.