In the Eternal Moment: Why I Garden; Why I Write ("On Hyndford Street" by Van Morrison)

 

I have this strange need to begin each writing session in the moment, which is probably why I’m a poet, not a novelist.   It would be difficult to write a novel in the ever present now, as that is always shifting, both internally and externally—as fluid as a reflection in a slow moving river or even a lake.  Sure that image may return tomorrow, but it will no longer be the same:  different light, different current, different sky—the mirror recording something new with each passing moment.

If anything, I am a photographer who uses words.  That limits me.   But perhaps, that is alright.  There is something centering about a pink gladiola next to a soft yellow gladiola behind the grid-wire fence—the delicate, giving petal cropped by the rigid square.

That is why I garden:  surfaces, textures, reflections.

I couldn’t explain that a week or so ago to the permaculture guild visiting my garden.  Not only do I know so little in comparison to them about growing soil and growing plants, but we are not even seeking the same experience.

They seek harmony though action.  Eating right, gardening right to sustain the planet.  Very admirable.  At an abstract level, I want that too.

But that isn’t what drives me.  It’s the moment.  Here.  Now.  Dragon flies hovering above my pond.  Jack, my cat, softly meowing, as he prowls the garden and discusses his finds in a language I don’t understand but comprehend fully.

Life is in the grasshopper, which is why I felt like a murderer capturing one off my giant sunflower and feeding it to my chicken.  It’s not playing by the game rules.  It nearly made me sick.  I’d have no problem with the chicken getting it on its own, but to give a grasshopper the death sentence simply because it was trying to make a living in my garden doesn’t seem right.  In fact, it felt like sin.

Perhaps it was pure coincidence, but a storm of small birds, sparrows I think, swirled in on my yard to do my dirty work.  Call it what you will, nature, God—balance is being achieved without me having to destroy anything.  All I have to do is step back and enjoy light, patterns, flickering light, fluttering sounds--the hum of a fly and buzz of a humming bird, the soft sinking of day into goodnight.

I am astounded by life and only want to be transparent enough to reflect back light.  There is a pond and in it there is a sunset.  And the pond and the sunset and the bedrock beneath are the word, and anyone who listens deep will do right.

That is why I garden.

That is why I write.

When I’m fully in the now, if at no other moment, I do right, which feels good.  I soften, open.  Grasshoppers become sacred even while they devour my favorite sunflower.   Hate does not dance on the surface of a pond.  Only light.  Love.   God.

Winning dissipates with last light of day and I become whole with the night.

 

 

 

Dry Creek and a Sunday Song: "Sunday Morning" by Bobby Byrd and "Hymns to the Silence" by Van Morrison

It's July at Dry Creek.  The fields have gone from green to burnt sienna, to ochre.  Heat is heavy, the sun intense in the morning and early afternoon.  Then the thunder clouds build--bold, black and threatening.  Sometimes it sprinkles.  Once it poured.  But usually, it does nothing.

This afternoon I sat on the toilet and read,  "Sunday Morning" by Bobby Byrd. Though a poem, it seemed like the perfect song this week.  It could have easily stood alone.  But, as it called to mind Van Morrison's "Hymns to the Silence," I have also included that, even though the two works only relate the way lines in some poems relate, loosely--image rhymes, one image triggering another.  

Enjoy.

Sunday Morning

Two old guys walk single file
Slowly and wordlessly around a room.
A white curtain filters the sunshine.
Outside is the hot desert sun.

The two men are shoeless.  The smaller,
the guy in front, is limping because
40 years ago in Vietnam a kid in black pajamas
shot him in the head and almost killed him.

The other guy dodged that war,
lived in the mountains, lived in the city,
wife and three kids, drank a lot,
wrote some poems.  A candle flickers,

incense burns.  The floor is clean
because these two men cleaned it.
Three others were here but they left.
The man in front slaps two wooden

clappers together.  The sound startles
the man behind.  He takes a deep breath.
The men stop walking.  The first man
Lights a stick of incense and places it

in front of a statue of the Buddha.
They bow to their cushions on the floor.
They sit down cross-legged and stare
at the wall.  Their legs ache.  It's been

three days now.  Not much longer.
One of them is the teacher,
one of them the student.  It doesn't
make much difference which is which.

--Bobby Byrd

printed with permission from the author

Newly finished outdoor kitchen viewed from the garden.

Rabbit brush and grapevine along front walk.  Mount Catherine in the background.

Sunflowers in Marci's cutting-flower garden.

A bench my brother, Lloyd, built along the edge of Dry Creek Canyon.   He placed it here so our step-dad could still enjoy the canyon when he got too old to walk down in it.

Dry Creek Canyon

"Sunday Morning" is from Otherwise, My Life is Ordinary, published by Cinco Puntos Press.