Smoke

Contrast

Letting go of the false belief of control can be difficult especially when I believe that I am the only one who knows. In a sense I am the only one who does know what is happening in this yard, for I have watched the land for nine years now. I have watched nothing but three inch tall “grass” become soil and the floor of a canopy of trees where birds come to wish me well during breakfast each morning.

I have watched my view become blocked. I have watched paths go unknown other than by those who have walked these paths before, and even then, without pants, these paths become an attack ground for mosquitoes. Yet I pick up an aquarium from the side of the road in the Lower 9th Ward because I believe that putting guppies into this will lessen some of the mosquitoes. I believe a space in the shade where I might put water lily on top because I have see this happen already.

For what I grow to be admired, people need to see clearly. And for this I will hire Angie. I will leave her and her crew alone and I will demarcate the spots where special trees grow. Perhaps I will leave. Perhaps this will be a day where I begin another canvas, or where I work a block away on Needle Street. 

I would like to give her the power and control of this yard for that day, to give her the worry I often hold that nobody can help me for the times when I lost a jujube tree or a citrus. What I have or rather consider to be a problem is a good one. I have a giant curry tree and two pineapple guava right in the middle of the yard where I would like and open space to be. Right in the middle of the yard where cayratia Japonica snakes up and through the branches of these three trees.

Angie calls this vagina creeper, a bastardization of virgina creeper, a totally different plant. I tell her this every time she says the words.

She says this ground is holy. I have held people on this ground while they cried. I have made fires and sat in circles and watched as the faces went from animated to content and listened to the voices drop from chatty to silent.

There is a moment that comes when the fire glows, when sparks rise up to the sky. 

Have I told you of how, together with friends, we sometimes burn old ideas. Have I told you that I took a part of the old self and wrote a word on paper. That one week ago I threw this paper out the window of the same room where wasps sometimes come in and decided to let worry become a part of the earth.

The earth, like tonglen meditation, is quite capable of handling my worry, of taking this in and devouring this and turning this into life. I don’t know where the paper is now. I know that there are two ways of looking at the same thing. I know that while walking along the river we saw the giant stretching painting that said, “YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL” and underneath this, on the side of a train in the foreground, “I hate myself and want to die.”

In the fire there are wishes older than the dinosaurs. In the fire there come dreams and beliefs and high rising wire acts of smoke that blow with the winds of hope, for fire is able to take what once grew in this space and quickly turn this into something that will grow in the future.

I lived in the Treme after Katrina. I sang Spanish songs with Hondurans. I watched Washboard Lisa sing while Roberto played his steel guitar and Donovan kept the fire burning in the rusty old fifty-gallon drum. 

It was in this house, with the ceiling falling in, that I listened to men, that I watched transformations, that I first realized what it meant to burn everything that does not serve. I watched worry drift down from my window days ago, but I first watched worry whittled away from the faces of young men who did not believe it possible.

Everything is on the verge of becoming. Everything is energy. In some of the Native American dialects there are no nouns because they knew that everything we label contains energy. Everything is a verb.

So on Wednesday, I will mark what I do not want cut, and I will leave, and I will trust God. And for that day, God will be dressed in Carharrts and some strange hat, and if you see God that day, you might mistakenly call her Angie.