Harvest

What's coming to harvest is a hearty wheelbarrow full of someone else's hope. What did I plant? Did I tend? Did I remember to water?

The other day when I decided to give my voice a break, I replanted and de-headed and pared away the brown clingy mass of a succulent pot that had gone mostly unattended under an eave out back. I stuck my hand slowly into the old cheap gloves, worrying myself over saber-toothed tigers, spiders, or angry ants. I hadn't pulled a weed in years.

My garden is wild and overgrown and anchored by dry, rocky dirt and an enormous boulder the height of a two-story home and as round about the base of a circus tent. It mirrors or mocks my insides.

I planted so many seeds along the way, spring being my shower of vitality, my blood pump, my pulse. I wandered and sprinkled and tossed a million wildflower promises into and atop the unsuspecting grounds of this life, this meditation I may be sleeping through, this dream. Only twice did I stoop down then, drop to my very knees to carve out an entire universe in my soil to deposit these little beings.

These preciosa, these boys. Thank God for the rain and for always bumbling with too many things in my arms that by grace and sheer spilling did those little beings grow.

I would like to account for their sturdiness, take credit for their stately divine, the way they have grown all up and out into their own, into the foot of the bee, the pollinator of dreams, the wonder. But I am only a planter, a bumbler of sorts, hands always full with so many projects. It's as if by accident things around me grow.

What I did was love and believe that they were capable of anything. I collect wildflowers and tall grasses and small whispers of plants some people call weeds. I let the thistle grow and raise their regal, thorn-crowned heads into the majesty of their own purple delight. Then have Pablo reuse them in the compost just before they start talking back.

This could almost be a story about my tribe. I love the weeds and the thorns and the dandelions, the undervalued enormity of the heart of a root of a weed of a person whose name no longer matters.

I like to think I have planted seeds of encouragement in the hearts of people who feel forgotten and that when I die people will use my bones and flesh, my eyelashes, my grief and they will compost it with the rest of them and say she gave us something to eat when we were hungry or a home in her heart when we were unhoused. I suspect people will say she was a giver and someone else will say she was smart because giving has always been the smartest thing I have ever seen anyone do to survive.

Today the metaphor grows tired, harvest upon us near done, a wheelbarrow full of forgiveness, hand clippers tidied in a back pocket to rest. I am not a gardener. I am an eye that sees you growing toward the sun. I am an echo that recalls what your heart speaks and does not depend on you for words.

She's getting quiet now. The third person, like the third eye, opening up some psychedelic trip-the-light fantastic possibilities like laughing gas at age six or ketamine at 105.

It's hard to entirely let go of her body, the way it moves and rushes and plays, the old creaks and groans settling in like the sun, lover, and sky, the fallen leaves, the end of something that mattered. She was told before she was born that there was a season to all of her knowing, a place on the medicine wheel, a direction in time. She chooses true north, always in the deep underbelly of what lies dormant and asleep.

She awakens in others the South, the playful yes of being alive, and to the West the ridiculous wonder of everything possible. She is planting now for the East, knowing her life depends upon it.

letting go of all the spaces left behind when the words fell away so that all that will be left is the empty, the great big beautiful empty from where those two magic seeds once wondered, over which she recalls an actual toiling on her own part when measuring up against something else was unheard of, she heard. And she and I are becoming more familiar, friendly almost. I'd be delighted to take her to tea.

In the morning, she reminds me about where the sun rises. In the east, she says, in the east. I want to argue sometimes because I think how can it be the beginning where the end point is? But wisdom is wise because of circles.

It is hard to sit here and listen. The clock ticking like a matadome on the piano I couldn't quite master. The practicing I couldn't commit to doing. An airplane flies over on some path in some direction full of some people on some mission and I can only witness the entirety of the trip, all its parts dispersed in the passing hum. Acorns drop, pens scratch. I can actually feel the inside lining of a person's heart near me shudder.

The thump of breath hitting the burdened air around me like a sigh. I think she would say more about her children if she could step far enough outside of the unapologetic gutting that's been lived since their leaving. That these little seeds, these gorgeous lion's paws, these beautiful boys are thriving once plucked is beautiful and leaves a hole the size of God.