Walk on Water

Aren’t they cute?

The pastor said, “You’re the coffee grounds guy, right?” Right indeed, I told him. You wouldn’t think he was a pastor were you to see him at the Food Co-oP where he got the hat he wore for a dollar years ago. I know this only because I had the same hat. And I once had a beard almost as long as his.

He told me he kept chickens at his house and asked if I did the same. 

“I have cooped them up in the past. Maybe it’s time I do again, but I like to watch them run free.” 

“I have six kids,” he said. “We need our eggs.”

I met this pastor at Lowpoint days before, between tossing a fly-ridden chicken corpse from the back of my truck and dumping coffee grounds in the same spot. He sat with an acolyte, though I didn't know it at the time. 

I couldn't help interrupt my own day’s plans and say, “Tell me about this, what you’re reading.” 

It was a copy of Spiritual Leadership by Jay Oswald Sanders. I’d never heard of the book or the man.

The younger of the two said that the older was his pastor and he was studying to do the same. They invited me to this morning’s mass at a theater inside the Healing Center, the old Cafe Istanbul where I have been for poetry readings, burlesque shows, and to watch a bunch of sober drunks chatter on and eat pizza.

This late morning was different. His wife sang. His daughter, too. She played keyboards also. And another guy played guitar. The three songs each a sweet melody of praise to Jesus. They sang, “You are joy” which I liked and then “I’m running to your arms” which led me to think I’m already there. I considered how to set aside what I thought I knew, but it’s hard to drop concepts and receive concepts at the same time. I guess the truth always harkens back to Keating’s idea that God’s first language is silence and all else a poor translation.

The pastor read John 6 where Jesus walks across the water and the people come and say, “Holy shit, how you did that, man?” And the pastor inferred that they’re asking the wrong question, that they don’t even know their own motivation, they’re seeking to get, that Jesus already showed them he’s a badass. They wanted to know how they could work, what they could do, like so many of us, a program laid out to make me better.

I think of this when I walk circles around the land and start dozens of projects. What this pastor said was that the people needed to believe, and I won’t get into the whole argument of religion here, but what I will say is this.

There is bread enough for everyone. There is abundance. Love is a cup that runneth over to steal from some poet. And this is what I sometimes forget when I want the land or the people or anything to be a different way, when I think there need be change in order to be joy. For I am joy. You are joy. Jesus is, too. 

So what I think Jesus was saying or what John was trying to say Jesus was trying to say–see how deep this wormhole can go–is to believe. Believe that all is in perfect order, that the only thing stopping you from walking on water is your need to know how. 

What nature says is that all is being taken care of. Before church, Nasim listened to something that came to me this morning. 

She said, “You write effortlessly.” *

To find the connection, there is no other way. To pay attention. 

Moments before her compliment, I sat in my office, the place where I relieve myself each morning, and I read Annie Dillard, and now I will read to you me quoting Annie Dillard quoting Henry David Thoreau. Kind of like the bible now that I think about it. Somebody quoting somebody quoting somebody. And what Thoreau said was, “Nature is mythical and mystical always and spends her whole genius on the least work.”

Months ago I took two by fours that my father held when he was still alive, that he sent nails through thirty years ago, that he positioned to build a deck where our family sat for as long as I can remember and, these boards I hauled from Iowa, I sawed in New Orleans and built into a box where I added leaves and coffee grounds and scraps of food, and when I got back from the pool this afternoon, after church, a mother hen sat with what was left of her dozen baby chicks, perched atop that box I built, where what I gathered was mixed by their feet, where those babies were raised on the daily bread that came from death and decay creating new life. 

*She told me what she really said is, “You’re effortlessly talented. Natural.”