Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Linger

What does it feel like to be real? Like my first garden, fenced in green bamboo and chicken wire, a stone wall on the east side, embedded in Summer grass the mower can’t touch, filled with kale, and cherry tomatoes over-growing their bamboo tepees threaded with the strips of an old and faded purple bed sheet, one daring pole raising a thin streamer above the jungled garden. The smell of that green bamboo, the crumpled brown leaves it once bore which I couldn’t bear to commit to the bonfire, and stuffed as decoration into the near invisible mess of wire that was my handmade fence. Inside the weeds sidle against a foot worn path of purple brown, now clay-like earth that presses cool and reassuring against the toes I spread luxuriously outward, toad-like, as they received my weight. Who can navigate the garden but me? Cool air tickling around my neck and ears, all green eyes and bundled up diaphanous skirt between elegantly bent fingers. Wildness and home, observer, wanderer and tender, child, tattered one, reluctant and cool as evening in Summer when the Sun has released the earth from her stare and leaves purple grey dusk hanging gently round our shoulders. Safety, quietness, impermanence, solitude, security, hope. Life.

Picture to yourself, a tomorrow worth living for. Remember for yourself, a yesterday in simple reflections of who you are. Imagine it, paint contentment, sketch out peace in musty cabin smells, laughing hyperbole, deep green under-foliage light illuminated by happy cat smiles. These are the pieces I have, and like some dogged anthropologist, I make a life out fragments, tell some story by the little evidence of really living, put a person back together. Put my soul back together, as light lingers ever longer, resting against the fortress of hills around me, as ever closer I come to decide.