Very Good
In my backpack pocket there is a memory from Toronto, from her putting a coffee cup with a lid, a cup I’d forgotten until now as I walk out the door and surprise a squirrel in a fig tree who hops to a persimmon, to mulberry, to a place I cannot see, never losing the fig clenched between her teeth. Not yet ripe, the one the squirrel took, not like others, coated in fruit flies and mold. The woman who cared for me with a coffee cup is the same woman who told me that trees like when we eat their fruit. I would argue the trees want the fruit eaten to be ripe, not like the attempt I foiled last night, by a raccoon on a branch of the persimmon before dusk even passed.
Dawn has passed now, a new day where I allow myself the time to slow down, to do nothing, a rare occasion even in the heat of the New Orleans summer. I sit on a sofa in a coffee shop and sip. I read Dispenza’s Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself. Sam sends me a photo of tithonia, new leaves sprouting from the sticks I gave him a month ago, and this is enough to satisfy my need to grow.
For now, to leave the beta blast of emergency. To look at the Job’s tear beads wrapped around my wrist, to know I started the plant from seed years ago, to know I no longer remember what the seeds looked like. To know that these beads never stay black, that each is different, the seed world equivalent of a snowflake, the gray of a cat’s eye seen through the lens of LSD, the notion of charcoal, ash, and white, the speckle of the egg of a blue jay, the idea that this, that these are nothing but a gift God spread, and maybe these twenty four that I harvested and strung on a copper strand serve as a means to slow my thinking, like the music in this coffee shop or the hundred and eight beads you find on a strand in Nepal.
Have you ever known the insanity of creating tasks and then becoming overwhelmed by the very tasks you created?
Did you know instead that there is an old Navy base near the Mississippi River where junkies and meth heads and other people with cans of spray paint have tried to compose their hearts onto walls and windows for all to see? Did you know there is mint to sniff on the seven hundred block of Lesseps, a canopy of cypress around 822, a bar a few steps further where an old man becomes young again and plays blues on his birthday, and on this day, a street where more life might be missed if you don’t look down to leaf litter and sticks, or consider how to lift cigar cellophanes and straws from the midst of this.
Praise glory for the sound of a jet overhead, for shadow of cypress branches, for a black swallowtail butterfly flap into the sun on silence. And this is what they mean when they say, “this is the day the Lord hath made.” And this, my friends, is everyday.
The way Brian Banks told me that my words offer him the opportunity to find something to appreciate in what could be the mundane of each day. For me, the way the lady at Hong Kong Market straps on plastic gloves after switching with the first cashier. The stained nature of the plastic tips, the split between thumb and index finger, the way she looks at me, proud, holding my fifty finger bananas, wrapped in plastic, on sale for a buck thirty-nine, and she says “Good!” And it sounds like “goot.” And I remember walking the streets of Saigon with a dictionary and hearing the same pronunciation.
And life is this way when I am able to snip the neural pathways that lead to the need of doing anything other than what is being done. I know, standing in line, reveling in the delight of my bananas, just how happy the skins will make the worms, and though one could argue against the possibility of worms feeling happiness, I would say that this is what streams through every detail, through every breath, through a flap and a shadow and a rise and a set, through good and bad. Even through goot. Which translates as “very good”.
