Spring Bee Hiving Moon
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” by George Bernard Shaw
Later today, beets blood, bull and golden and carrots, Nantes and one lone blueberry to replace a dead plant. I think about it, this planting and nourishing, watching and waiting, then harvesting and preserving and eating, and I feel a part of my life being created. This part gets its hands dirty, relishes the seasons and their graces, their vagaries. This part looks at shades of green, knows this most important color as a friend and ally.
Another part, this one quiet and inward, wanders the halls of art museums, galleries, image collections on the internet and in books. Looking. Seeing. No dirty hands here. Visual contact. Delight in a curve, a color, an image, a remaking of tradition, new ways of perceiving. This one knows the spread of art from Chauvet Caves to MOMA and delights in each creative moment.
Then the father. And husband. The family guy. Cousins, aunts, uncles. Grandpop. One in a line. A link between that great one-celled ancestor and the transformation of our species that is yet to come. Love not abstract but concrete and timeless. Walking with children and their children, walking on toward some unknown future. Together. That’s a part.
A noisy chunk, this one involved in struggle, voicing the cries of the poor, the victims, the forest under siege, the child with no food, the mother with no roof, the woman with no safety, the waters helpless before their contaminators. Here the ways we act together take precedence. Arms linked, voices raised. La Lucha.
The small town. A store of memories of times when matters no longer close but the baseline for all that has come later lived as the present. Bike rides, baseball games, kick the can after dark, school year after year after year after year. Mom and Dad. Home. Brother and Sister. All dispersed. Mom and Dad dead. A combination cemetery and museum of my past.
This part, this me loves words. Reads fiction, non-fiction, poetry. Consumes books, then purchases more books, still reading, chomping up line after line, then composting them in neurons and synapses. Writes his own word, putting out line after line, trying to repay the great debt from all those others. All those who wrote before him. To sing their praise, to add a note to their great symphony.
And, of course, the wanderer. Who wonders what lies just past the curve of the earth? What are they doing over there in China, Cambodia, England, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Chile? How do they do it? What colors do they love? What music do they embrace? What makes them the distinctive people they are? Most important for the wanderer lies in the stranger experience. The moment when his America has been stripped away, slunk away into the no longer there distance and he walks among the ruins of Angkor, or Ephesus or on the sacred island of Delos.
As near as I can tell, these are the major parts I’ve been creating, shaping. The life my hands and feet and eyes and brain and heart and soul have imagined into existence. And neither imagination nor life is yet exhausted.
