The neighbor said that my biggest fix in resolving this journey through ancestry, gardening, and painting is a presumption that everything is eternal. Musing in the lows of the words, he reminded me everything dies. A three year old rose in my throat. I started to fume. I bitched. I moaned. In the slow realization, I held back the tears. Funny how I go into severe psychosis when my hands prove otherwise to my neighbor's joking and family advising.
My hands in the garden, tend to the long stretch of summer. Come autumn I can let some things seek shelter in the refuge of the house. Still, that is not everything in pots or the dirt. I also argue against my neighbor's instruction by refusing to be wrong by not touting the plant's long winter's sleep. Damn you! Everything does not die! Damn you to hell! Yeah! Yeah! Next time I will bring the cookies.
Secretly I can whisper in guilt that every autumn it is the same grief. I continue to water despite the growing patches of brown on every leaf. Even after being ever confident the green will return in a few days, my psyche cracks when the first frost claims every late blooming flower and frond. Late summer watering comes with a process of surprises that I commit to every year. Come every blistering day of heat in August, I ignore the call of death and dehydration. Nothing dies, you hear me! Nothing dies. I refuse to become banal and gloss over the death of the summer bounty. I grieve in confusion especially when I stand at the foot of the kale and collard plants mother planted over four years ago. They come back every year. Why should I not presume the rest will as well. My eternal is the mint bushes as well. Still they need more room to grow. Their roots crowd the growing stems to the edge of the planters. As for that lesson I relate that family eventually leaves to start over. We get pushed out of the nest by our past. I wonder how many memories does a house hold before an Amityville Horror like expulsion rejects every human? How many years then until the heart of the house dies? Again, my problem, why can I not consider the house eternal? In the least, why does the garden not survive me physically? I may be arguing from the wrong angle. The only ideas that sit at my head are human soul is eternal and I still mourn my grandmother. Considering that, why is not the artifact and efforts of my experience eternal as well?
Right now, I do not see the point of looking death straight on. I can not bear a viewing. I can live in metaphors, dreams, and images. I can grieve quietly in my vehicle after watching my symbolic attachments parade the avenue as if they knew anything of me. As for Hubris and mourning, it reflects all my pomposity and most of my expectations of death. If I live in symbols, running away from a natural end is averted. Maybe the real problem to acknowledging mortality is that I just can not seem to grasp change over time. For eternal to be ever mine, maybe I found a way home. Maybe they dammed the river upstream and I can cross in the same place twice. What happened to yesterday, today, and tomorrow? Can't give me an answer can you? Everything is eternal - so there. As for the garden and the gouache paintings, I faithfully watered and pruned for that many years to become desperate enough to see my work move someone, something, somewhere. Pride turned conceit tells me that maybe I need to let go of attachments. If I did, then it all would be for nothing. Releasing all coveted memory would result in forgetting why I took brush and paint to paper the month she died. The point of art maybe to sell, but where I am is no less far from maintaining sanity. The like are those pieces that survived Van Gogh. My eternity in Hubris is no less than Ars gratia artis and beauty born of strife. No matter if they reside in the trash dump or the safe of a museum, I can not give up.
I am harbored and healed by these misconception s of mortality. One day my ignorance may cripple me. To be coddled then, until then.
About four in the afternoon I went to water the foundation. Afterwards, I could not help but harvest carrots, Chinese cabbage, and celery seed as well. The seed was the only disappointment. Spiders wove well around each seed cluster. I did not need to mix its efforts with my desires for home grown seasonings. If I had, surely it would be a problem for the doctor to solve.
As for the carrots, they might be my eternal as well. I cut the tops off outside because of ants in the foliage. Memory nudged me to root them in water before taking the carrots inside for cooking. Flashbacks of Gram's apartment window with cut carrot tops and sweet potato slips nesting in water are beginning to etch in a transparent layer over my eyes. Plants change rooms. Plants change people. Plants change passages. Funny how in my memory I am expecting the plants in her window to grow. Over five years have passed since I was there. I just looked in my mind's eye. The sweet potato slip is cascading over the air conditioning unit. The carrot tops are crowding the mouth of the Mason jar. My eternal may be about following shapes in memory. Architecture first, Color the mood second. I refuse my practice to be a misconception of mortality. Argued from the side of the living, maybe. Yet, those with eyes to see have the occasion to peer the immortal. No doubt, as I have time, it is all I the brush for me, at least for now. No coddling this time, resolve definite.
~As ever, stay hungry and curious.