The latest news and muses in and around the Merry Green Marvel
1/4/18 I was struck by this arrangement when I was working in Ms Sybil’s house with volunteers in Jacksonville. An altar to brokenness: trying to hold on to some semblance of family and order amidst a flooded home. These are family photos she’s trying to dry out presided over by a one winged angel, a fine shy gentleman waiting in the corner for a dance at the debutant, a black cat and of course Jesus.
Trying to be part of the force of Love here in the mold and cold!
I’ve reached my Zenith. I’m living in a van down by the river. Actually it’s a bus and I’m making like a troll and living under a bridge by the swamp in Louisiana. The swamp down here makes no pretensions about it’s Zenith. This is unabashedly the low point where the river muck from far North tendrils its way South bogging in a mire.
I have answered a call to come to the swamp to know the slog that broods and hatches. To know truth in this swirling world of untruth and carelessness. I want to feel my feet sink into what may well be a speck of the silt that I once pulled weeds from as a kid in the fields of Iowa tall corn country. I want to live in the swamp to get to the bottom of it, to know after the floods have raged and the mighty waters have circulated through heartland and pushed out to the ocean what’s left?
I was trying to clean the fryer grease off an old commercial grade cook stove that a Trump Supporter/NRA member had gifted me to support my project of housing and feeding cypress tree planting volunteers. I had just hopped in the driver’s seat on the bus to get the phone when the answer flew down, end over end through the morning blue, off the top of the bridge. It was a Jack Daniels bottle shattering on the stove where I had just been working.
The phone call was my buddy Jim calling to hatch a plan to fix a clogged toilet in my house up North that I was renting out. Jim had gotten a call from the tenant. It was a sub zero morning and he had ventured out. As he was going on about how it was so cold that the stink pipe might have iced shut causing the toilet not to draft, hence the clog, “Maybe we could throw some rock salt down the…” I interrupted him sheepishly with, “Ah Jim... I think you just saved my life?!? I mean did you get any background noise of glass shattering?”
Out of the humid humility of the swamp there emerged once again the truth that I knew and could have known anywhere, but needed a bottle of Jack to distill it down for me: Live life like everything matters. Everything is related. We hang in this delicate mystical balance that leads from one far fetched impossibility to the next. The chain of events that holds us up to walk this Earth is ever tenuous and infused with an awful grace that one moment can be lauded and the next leaves us despaired and wailing. And not like I couldn’t wail on ad nauseum about the inner despair.
But on this occasion I have the privilege to marvel. And marvel I shall. How I go, but for the If Jim hadn’t called when he did to muse about a solution. If the toilet hadn’t clogged. If there hadn’t been that brutal cold spell. If the tenants hadn’t ate a Pizza Hut low fiber diet that produced torqued turds that were bound to log jam any toilet. If I hadn’t been raised an Iowa hog farmer. If Jim and I hadn’t bonded a friendship from helping me chase escaped hogs through 7 foot burdock “trees” under a full harvest moon. If that bond wasn’t so strong that thirteen years later he’d leave his home fire on a thirty below morning to help me far away taking in Louisiana sunshine. If the Mississippi watershed hadn’t pulled that fertile Iowa top soil down to this swamp. If I didn’t feel displaced and searching for my home in this messed up country.
Of course these chains are like the double helixes that contain our essence and they’re everywhere, billions and guzillions, and we can only begin to unravel them. I mean there’s probably one with Drew and a Jim Beam bottle too. At some point you just have to say, If It Hadn’t Been For Love!
In one Yosemite dawn along the Merced River I met test tube twins from London who said they were teased at school that they had no souls.
Crescendos of white granite gathered in the gold given by the sun's rise. These twins now young women, gazed up from their wading in this River of Mercy. I saw their eyes animate this home they were being given.
A place where the minutiae of their test tubed zygotic zeal swelled over filling this valley like great waterfalls surging into river.
And in return this morning of immense valley flowed into them sketching indelible song lines in notes of fir, sequoia, ponderosa, aspen and red wood shaping a soul scape that opens like a colossal caress that says you can always come home here no matter how darkly dwindled or far away you've gone.
This valley becomes an ancestral call to gather. The place you come to inherit. I have seen the levity of your birthright float up from the dull and the dismal pit and lift your gaze upward.
I have seen you all coming home from the fray: The twins, burlesque fire spitting hoola hoopers, a guy in a faux leopard coat with head phones dancing to his Half Dome muse, a San Francisco fire fighter, a ghetto kid labeled as a disorder to his school, an ex CIA agent, a guy who cleans the church, roller derby queens from Liverpool, Chief Tenaya's children, Desert Storm veteran from Missouri, ex NYC model with her two boys, from China a grand daughter taking her grand father, descendent of Oregon Trail pioneer, great great grandson of a Buffalo soldier.
You all bow or nod or just stand there still and eventually have to shuffle back on the bus eyes shimmering with a lake mirroring this pursuance of a soul.
Roll call on Mardi Gras morning was at 5 am as I rolled away from the swamp to head on down to see the Zulu King! I rode my bike through the streets of New Orleans. What a thrill an Iowa farm boy weaving in and out of traffic jams to get to where the parade was assembling and where it started. The parade began with the 100 member Southern University band sending out a clarion call of brass that must have pierced the cold gray sky. The plumes on their marching hats conducted rays of sunshine as they marched under the live oaks. The first sun we had seen after a week of rain. Soon after came the Zulu king himself and of course the queen. Spike Lee was the honorary king and busied himself throwing beads. I caught a coconut!
Perhaps the biggest thrill of the day came as the sun was setting and I came onto a Mardi Gras Indian chief under the I-10 overpass near Cajun Seafood with his entourage of spy and flag boys! Soon he was confronted by another Chief and a taunting swirling dance of colorful feathers, beads, drum beats and singing ensued. Wild Tchoupitoulas! I was touched to feel up close the inter-generational family tradition of artful work that makes that dance happen year after year, generation after generation. I imagined the hours and hours of intricate sewing that went into the costume. The love and dedication of family members coming together after coming home from work in their Northside shotgun style home: Killin em dead with needle and thread! This was a life of creating not just passive consuming! I cried to see the chief's daughter come up to him with a towel and wipe the sweat from his face during a pause from carrying his head dress. And the future chief! A little guy who could have been barely two banging on a tambourine, exclaiming the rhythm that he heard from the womb! I could feel the strength and grace of it all holding this family together. I laughed to see the traffic jam on St Bernard Ave that the Indian face off caused. And yet no one honked this is just what we do in this neighborhood on Mardi Gras day. Indians!!!!!! Fighting in the streets!!!
After we followed the Chief on down the street toward his home in the twilight. I sat on the side walk just outside a home that had a makeshift sign tacked to the side of the house. I picked out the $7 plate of red beans and rice with a slab of catfish. Served up right from the home kitchen of Belinda and Troy. What a lovely end to a lovely day to eat my plate of food on the sidewalk as the neighborhood homes began to turn on lights. I got to talking with Troy and Belinda and told them I was gearing up to bring volunteers to plant cypress trees on the Northshore. I asked them if they could cook up some rice n beans with some volunteers and share with us a bit about the history of their neighborhood and issues facing it today. They were happy to oblige saying, " The church channel was saying to me this morning to expect a stranger coming with good news. We all can learn from one another."
"Mardi Gras is the love of life. It is the harmonic convergence of our food, our music, our creativity, our eccentricity, our neighborhoods and our joy of living. All at once" Chris Rose
Love from New Orleans.
