Song sparrows, and earthy things

A drippy, nosed flu bug came to visit me, with misery of nose, and face, and sneezing, and ouch of ears. 

And a fever. Though, I feel like it broke last night, because I woke up in a pile of drool, and drenched in sweat. 

I feel cooked, al dente.

And ethereal. 

And relief. 

And content. Happy for simple things, like air, and breathing, and nature, and taste, and my own ambiance, like a glowing salt lamp. Glad to know I'm not useful to anyone, or myself, or pestered by my own shoulds. My fingers are working, and my laptop is lapping, and my spirit is humming.

And my mind is so cooked, whatever comes out is probably charcoal, maybe something refined, we hope. And if not, it's just a meal, overdone, or underdone, a stew, or something baked, we don't know.

We.

Me and my muse, that stopped by. 

We are just writing, brewing, much like the thunder that is stewing outside my window, rumbling as the beautiful clouds are composing their magic. 

The day feels spacious, clear, glasslike.

Birds are outside my window vying for seeds in my little bowl.  My sister has a bazillion birds. So many parakeets, and parrots, and she is always sending me the discarded bird seed for my bird Sophy to eat.

I put some it out for the birds around my house to eat.

Little red-hedded song sparrows, and yellow birds I have no name for, sit under my window gifting me a song, while they accept the offering, digging around the seeds, finding the goodies the parrots didn't like.

I think it's a good exchange.

A bird's happy hum, for a few discarded bits of corn, and seeds, and I get a song.

May, how would I describe it? What words? Though my brain has been full of them---words, all jumbled, and gubmled, and wadded, and tangly, I'm not sure what to write about.

My sister thinks in pictures, and I would much rather think in pictures, than words, as they get crowdy, and noisy, and it sometimes is tricky to pick out ones that actually feel right. 

Kind of like the sorting through discarded bird seed. Searching for words parrots don't like, but sparrows do.

So, I'm not sure what will happen if I pull on the string of wadded words? Hopefully something viable comes out, some good word, with some nutrition for a sparrow to munch on. 

This is my word garden, after all. And empty shells, and dead grasshoppers are a little disappointing, unless you're a frog or a toad that likes grasshopper legs. 

How would I describe this past month? 

Well, it feels like a beautiful package of old, and new, fragrant, and bitter, and salty, and sweet things. Where you open it up, and you take a bite, and one minute it is amazing, and the next moment, you pick up another, and it tastes of mold, and old cobwebs that sticks to the roof of your mouth making it hard to speak. 

What color would this past month look like? Green. Vivid green that has sunlight sifting through its leaves.

What texture would you describe it as? Crumbly, and earthy, and moist, and muddy, and living, and real. 

What element? All if them, fire, water, earth, wind, and spirit, and elements included with spirit, like invisible sounds of windchimes, and bells, and whispers, and fragrances and memories, like childhood, and ancient things.

If it were a tree, what would it look like?

 A willow. 

What kind of nows have stopped by since the last now recorded here?

Many.

This is me picking through seeds. 

A very satisfying find, and beautiful day, was actually Mother's day.  Together, my sister and I made some delicious deserts for my mom, and then headed to Church to make music with 75 wiggly, multi-verity-sized kids, all and squiggling, churning in their seats, picking their noses, sticking our their tongues to touch their noses, and wilting on their chair like waxy candles, because they had already been in Church for an hour, which, in kid-time, means forever.

 And their teachers, who were all men, were substituting for their wives, because it was Mother's day. My sister and I brought a treasure chest she'd made out of old barn wood, and we filled it with musical instruments, that the kids got to pick out a musical treasure, and use.

We had drums, and shakers, and bells, and my sister's violin, and oh, so much noise. It was causing such a stir, I'm sure we woke the dead, and some living spirits, too. It was dangerously noisy, the kind you feel like you're being a bit of a nerd, and like it. We were lucky because not too many women were in attendance to hear, and stop this beautiful noise.

Oh, and we did the singing bowl, and we had all the kids humming, and dad's humming along with them too. 

That was so satisfying, and real, and wild. It felt like we were breaking old codes, and you could tell the men, and the children liked it too, like taking off uncomfortable shoes, touching their feet to the ground for the first time, and feeling the awe their own freedom.

After we officially made the loudest sound that little room has heard,  "the orange blossom special, complete with train whistles, and clackers, and drums, we went home. And then to wash away the static we collected, we dipped into the cold canal flowing by the end of our field. It was pickle your arm-hair cold, especially since we've gotten so much snow from the mountains this year. The thunder was a rumbling around us, and the water was so cold you couldn't tell if it was hot or cold, or both.  We screamed, and both felt invigorated. We baptized ourselves cleansing the human vibes off our skin, and all the stale chi of the room melted away. We let the current take us to end, where we got out, and sat in the sun, and shivered, and watched the clouds bubble and roll.

I like to think that we are serving humanity by swimming. That we are doing the most useful thing, looking so very unuseful, floating in the water to make the world a better place. I like to think that the water is magic after we swim in it, like we are two crystals, tuning the water, as it tunes us, maybe helping the water feel loved, so the earth will feel loved too.

That thought makes me happy, thinking we're making the world green, just by loving the water. Looking deliciously, perfectly content, and doing the most perfect, viable thing for the entire valley, and the earth. 

Loving the water, and ourselves. 

Who knew that was the trick to making paradise. Who knew it was that easy?

No toiling farmer would believe me. 

We sit on the bridge, freezing cold, and dripping wet, and the sun shining down on us, like two tropical,  palm trees, richer than queens, as we are the only ones in the whole valley that knows how perfect this place is, and what a gift it is to be free enough to enjoy it.

Me sorting through seeds again....

One more titbit that stands out to me, is how plants keep coming to my garden without any of my conscious will or effort. 

 I was feeling hindered as I had planted, and replanted, and tried sprouting seeds this year in my greenhouse, and the mice were so plentiful that my seeds got pillaged, and for all my effort, I was feeling discouraged because I my best triess were not working. 

 I went to a local Ace greenhouse, and considered my options. But thought it was too cold to plant anything out yet. I wandered through the trees, and admired the flowers, and plants, and left. 

It wasn't long after, that that one of my old neighborhood friends, who used to live across from me brought a huge assortment of plants. He had bought them, and then decided he didn't want them because wanted to spend the summer fishing. 

So he gifted them to me.

It was like he'd looked at all the plants I had wanted, and bought them. It was just a little bit uncanny.

Giant pumpkins, and watermelon, and lavender, and garlic, and kale, Rosmary, colored sunflower plants, and swish chard, and two apple trees, and a cherry tree, and three rose plants, and two hibiscus, and various ground covers, and tons of houseplants that are so beautiful, and so many, that it took me a long time to get them all planted.

I pondered where the apple trees should go as there were two of them, and I already planted one.

I didn't want to be greedy, so I thought about gifting the second one away to one of my sisters. 

But something told me not to, so I took off my shoes, and wiggled my feet in the ground, and thought about the whole assortment of plants.

And it struck me that perhaps, in an odd whispy sort of way, that his childhood self wanted me to have the apple tree, and plant it in memory of the adventures we'd had together as kids, of the wandering in the corn fields picking corn, and the asparagus hunts, and marshmallow roasts, and the times we'd scavenge treasures, and buried coal, thinking the coal would turn into precious stones.  We even buried old bones and hoped to dig them up once we were big, and hope they would turn into rare fossils. We would peer on top of the chicken coop and look for old bottles, and wander over to our neighbors, and scout for ostrich feathers. 

So, I dug a hole next to the coup, and placed the apple tree next to the ladder, so when the tree gets bigger I can go on top of the roof to pick apples. 

I think his childhood self would approve. 

As I planted the tree, it struck me how I had stayed here so long while many of my friends had come and gone, and now I'm planting their apple trees. Where'd he'd gone to war, and come back, and was now fishing again like his childhood self loved to do.

How odd it is that it takes a war or two for us remember how much we like fishing, or gardening, or simple things we used to do.

And I realized how sad it must be to be to be the ground, always there, where so many wars have been fought, and to hold so many bones.

And to be the one who has to go to war and never be able to find your home again even when you come back.

And I wept for the soil, and the bones buried in it, and violence on top of it.

And for all the things we have to leave, and forget and a paradise we seek, but don't find, because we are told it has to be earned.

So I planted the tree, and everything else he gave me, for the lost paradise so many people stray from, and for the old and young that still search in vain for a place that feels so hard to find once you leave it. 

And it seems the more I plant, the more plants keep coming, showing up on my porch, and I'm just directing where they go. 

Plants rained, down, shaken together, and overflowing so much that my garden is much more interesting, and full of more variety than I could have planned. I'm really having to be creative in order fit them all in. 

 I'm calling my garden the world garden, because if anything good is growing in it, it's a gift from someone else. I can't take credit for it. And if anyone wants something in it, it's probably something they gave to me to plant, because they didn't have time.

So much of my life is like that.

I'm just harvesting the bits of seeds that are leftover, but pieced together they are quite nice. Something that I'm made up of, a patch here, a bit of grace there. So much is something someone else grew, or cast away, so I can't really say I own anything, but I have everything I need. Because I have so much grace given to me, I can give it away with much more ease.

And that is the grace of my life.

My gardening degree belongs to everyone, and so do the plants, if they grow, it is also grace, and if they don't, I can't take credit for that either. 

I've been wondering if I'm actually a good gardener, or maybe a good planter instead, someone who really likes to design it in my mind, and when it comes down to it, I don't really know all that much about the right conditions for things to grow. I only know that if the soil isn't that great, so I add mulch, and if and the weather conditions are too hot, then I add water. And if there's too many weeds, you pull them out, and turn them into food for some other thing.

 In the back of my mind, my garden sounds like magic when I write about it. But if you saw it, it would look very ordinary, wild, and confusing.  I know many other gardeners are better than it than I. More precise, and they usually have better results. 

Nor would I say I'm a gardener, either.

I'm just traveler, a sparrow, looking, and seeing, and just here for a moment, exchanging cast off things for a song.

A world garden where it's not really mine, nor the soil, or the plants, nor the weeds.  I'm just a sparrow, really, remembering for a moment something everyone inherently knows, some remnant of a paradise that still exists when we spend time with earthy things.