This BeLIef

Some say we long for approval. Recognition even. I consider tithonia, the way these yellow flowers hover and sway twenty feet above the ground, the way I take France Street no matter where I’m going just for a glimpse of this majesty. I consider my own wants, the need to be appreciated.

I used to go to a greenhouse right off Calliope, a couple blocks from the homeless shelter. I learned how to put seeds into trays from Jamal and Katie. I learned how to tease roots from Joel and when to bump plants from plugs into four-inch pots from Emily and Denise and Margee. I learned so much from these OG’s. I watched their knowledge propel them to new heights and opportunities. 

I want to give recognition to those who have come before, to Jordan whose garden I would walk only blocks away from this same greenhouse, to Susannah who helped me to sort seeds, to Parkway Partners, to Jacob and Oliver who helped to build a cob oven in my yard, an oven we used only once, an oven that survived the winds of hurricanes. 

I want to thank the hundreds of kids I met along the way, the school that let me put a jungle on the corner where parents drop their children. The school called Akili, a word that means wisdom in Swahili, a school that no longer exists.

I remember the first school where I taught on the West Bank, how my classroom opened to a space where I planted arugula and beans and calendula. I remember Steven, the boy who peed his chair because I didn’t see his hand was raised. I remember his mother telling me the garden meant everything to him. I remember how he was the first to arrive in the morning with his cousin, how the two of them would water, how he one time put a paper towel in the drain of the sink to see what would happen.”

They told me before my first day, “Steven has autism.

They didn’t tell me how wonder is often stripped in the school system or how my own need for recognition could stifle the very life I desired. 

I remember sitting at a brewery in the 9th Ward that was once the house of a man named Josh who would play the saxophone while I got drunker and drunker. I got sober. Josh didn’t. Somebody told me pills took that house. Somebody told me the same pills took the life of the man who opened a wine shop nearby, the same man who had to listen to everyone tell him that he was crazy for opening up in the 9th Ward.

I sat at that brewery years ago and shucked pigeon peas and listened to the people in the city who grew things and I wanted to find my space and I wanted to find recognition and I wanted to offer some of these pigeon pea seeds. I wanted to offer moringa.

I remember a school in the East, how I gave Amber Dawn guava seedlings that produced fruit, the same with Brian in Mid City. I remember jamming cuttings of cassia around citrus trees at that school off Paris and giving moringa seedlings to Ron.

I read and I learned and I failed and I succeeded because all failure is a gift, an opportunity, a way to come to a knowing–the fruitlessness of the need for recognition. And yet I still sit with the dream of what will become of tithonia and will I be known and will I leave my mark upon the space where I walk.

Are there fig trees in Greece that hold the same sentiment, the same ideas of a man long gone, a man who wanted recognition? 

The reason for taking action does not always matter in the long run and there may be a boy named Niko eating a fig left by the hands of a man that nobody knows. 

And so, if you see bright yellow flowers stretching high in the sky of New Orleans, so high you find this hard to believe, suspend, my friend, just for the moment, and know I am with you.