Settle

Banana in Alexandria

I walked the length of a parking lot to find a spot alive enough to drop and cover a banana peel. I’m in a place called Alexandria, Louisiana. There is supposed to be a river here named after a color. There are many hunters here, I would guess. Some call this place the center of Louisiana.

My father never let me fire a gun or shoot a bow though I did get a few occasions to do this. There is a woman in the 9th Ward who raises rabbits and chickens and skins and plucks them herself. A man here told me that they call people like me twig eaters, but I do eat more than what grows in the ground and there is a part of me that wishes I would have grown with the idea of how to do all of this.

My dad took the family to campgrounds sometimes and we would put corn on the ends of treble hooks. I once knew how to make a daredevil lure jump, but I don’t really remember cleaning fish. I remember a big Northern that my cousin Chris tried to keep alive in a cooler and we knew that bad boy was dead in the morning from the smell that rose up from the kitchen.

I’m at a hotel with a lot of time stuck in front of a computer and because of this was able to update the website. It’s interesting how dropping into the flow allows for new creations of which you never would have thought. For instance, I started to put a section on the site with clients, with the idea of telling their stories. And as i wrote, I thought of all those who are not my clients but who I have met because of my love for what grows. I thought of giving a papaya to Adrian the other day. How his sister said she remembered me.

She said, “You gave my sister a kumquat tree. At the other house.”

I don’t remember her name. I really don’t remember her sister. But both live inside of me. All of this lives inside of us. The way sometimes somebody tells a story and you get shivers because their story connects you to your own. Because joy and love flows constantly.

So I thought of something called Humans of New York where, from what I know, a person captures stories of other humans. This I could do with what grows, with taking knowledge and experience from one to another. More than this with sharing, with knowing that nothing can be stolen in a world of sharing.

Nasim told me she saw the future, Holden in her arms with so much love. And we have laughed and we have cried, and everything before we met shaped us. She, too, seeks to connect with the divine inside those she encounters, and in these moments we both know that we are rich.

The first client I have who is not a friend sent me an email today. He said his new house has problems with every appliance, that the gate does not open, that he is working on things. I did not think first of how this might affect my work but instead wondered about how I might best help him.

This is the way to make a living. To go first with service. To find what you believe. 

I spoke with a friend last night who does landscaping. What he does is provide for a family. He might be a couple years younger than me with four kids. I’m in a unique position that I have some time, have had some time to grow and consider what I have to offer the world.

He spoke of different soil conditions, of things growing better in some soils rather than others. He spoke of what works well and what does not. I wondered aloud about how we have created the very conditions that we try to fix with the very methods that led to the problem.

What if the mind and dirt are really the same? What if all of this is stars screaming the praise that knows no name. What if the frequency of Jesus is the same frequency of a ringworm and the sound of a saxophone the same as a baby’s first hello?

I believe it is. We have all of this. The time between first words and last words.

Back to the way the mind and dirt are the same. When interference is the least the wind will still blow leaves and dust and you might liken this to swirling thoughts. In the end, everything settles. Everything settles in stillness. 

And in this stillness is the energy I always chased not knowing it was already here.