wildflowers

Cassiopeia 

These plants have been my project for the summer. It's funny. I didn't plant tomatoes, but they grew. Seriously. I didn't plant tomatoes. I planted strawberry plants and chilis. The chilis were eaten by slugs and the strawberries survived. ...then the tomato plants sprouted up from the ground like a time capsule left to me by the last tenant. One of the tomato plants gives me softball sized fruit and has a trunk thicker than my wrist. They have a will to live that is admirable. So I have agreed to take care of them. Besides my most faithful bamboo plant, I also have a eucalyptus bush, a citrus mint plant, a lenten rose named Alexandria, and two pots of flowers that live outside next to the wildflowers. The potted plants are named Cassiopeia and Molari. There are about 5 homeless bees that sleep in my flowers. And I have a mouse that lives in my tomatoes and strawberries that I have named Demeter. This is my house. These are my favorite facts of life that stand between me and the loneliness. 

I had a lonely day last week though. So I went and I took these photos where the sidewalk ends

:

Transitions. Life. Moving. Change.

I think I will leave those words on the virtual page for at least a day. Treat them as if they have ink that needs to soak in and dry on the page. There's been so much of all of that happening all around. It is a whole season in and of itself.

I want to write a poem with a central metaphor of plate-tectonics, another about painter's tape making my worlds make sense, one about my alarm sounding like a siren (which is actually just about done), one about limitations, and a few other's about nothing in particular. It is quite possible that a few of these may bleed over into each other. For that, I am excited. Until then: letting the words above dry. And yet, by the time you, invisible reader, find them... these words may be well past dry and much more towards stale.

This is what I am listening to today between one responsibility and another. It's all very interesting and only vaguely pertains to my ever continuing pursuit of trying to figure out what it means to be wholly human and live the life that a healthy functioning human being should. She has a tattoo which I have thought about getting ...or something similar to it; go figure. I like her talk though, especially the last few minutes.

Meanwhile, I have been hiding in coffee shops trying to study enough, leaving my computer at home. It is not my norm. I like to work from home when I am stressed. I like to come home to that safe place, shut out the world, and dig in my heels until I can push past and through whatever challenge is looming. Lately, however, my focus has waned. I am not trustworthy. I cannot stay home because I will cook, clean, talk to people, make art and all manner of other good rebellions will find me. Even now, as I type when I should be reviewing, I realize I am quite possibly misusing my time. My normal default of bookstores will not do either. I am sure I will be found in the arms of a book which has not the slightest thing to do with mechanics or airplanes.

And so the coffee shops find me awkwardly trying to recall what it is to order drinks that are always only three sizes but which are never called the same name. (I don't know if it's a tall, just give me 16 oz. of something hot...please.) Then there's the awkward turn around as I fumble to find a seat that is culturally acceptable (Portland is a city of misanthropic, space conscious people attempting to look intellectual... at a distance). I am incredibly out of practice.

I found myself, on one occasion, in a coffee shop that I had only been in one other time and that time belonging to a different life. It was sometime in my first few weeks of moving to Portland, to college, to this new life that I have made and grown so used to. I was sobbing. My RA was asking me about myself, trying to get to know me and finding herself ...in over her head. Even then, I could discern that she was in no way prepared for my tears or for the wounds which I then carried with me everywhere.

It was strange, is strange, to me to stumble upon such an isolated memory and to know that who I was then... is gone. And yet, I am still her. If anything, I am more her than I was then. I am who I was then only yet becoming. In the months and years that have filled the space (only 2 years...and yet a whole 2 years!), very little of my externals have changed. I am doing what I said I would be doing. The things that made me ache, bleed, and ... sob are still very much a part of my life, without much change in shape. When I am honest, they can still bring tears; but they are not the same tears I poured out in that coffee shop. I do not know if I am capable of explaining the difference.

Most simply, I am not who I was. I am more myself and less my weakness. Perhaps it is in the gradual separation of pain and identity. It is easy to take a wound and make it your name because it is all that you can see and feel. It is much more difficult to hold pain in an open hand...to let it hurt and make you cry until it heals and dissipates. The latter takes a good deal more practice, band aids, and time.

Coby? Koby? Colby? ...

Coby was still drunk when we met him. We may have woken him up as we stood by the car talking about lunch and passing off the responsibility to make decisions and plans. He had spent the night in a doorway not far from our church, passed out. He was strangely pleasant, though a bit bewildered by the fact that someone had stolen his shoes. I understood then that he had not been homeless in Portland for long.

We have so many homeless people and the competition between them only increases in the dry (drier) summers when the more transient population comes in and passes through. It is worse here than in a lot of cities I think. More than that, in the two years I have been here, the corners and bridges seem to be filling up steadily with an increasing population. Portland is simultaneously an easy city to be homeless in and a difficult one.

It is true more often than not what they teach you if you volunteer with homeless people for long, "everyone is from somewhere else." And everyone almost always is. It is part of the process. And so I have a habit of asking where they are from. He said Seattle. In fact, this was his first night in Portland. And someone stole his shoes. He said he had never walked outside without shoes before and that it hurt. (I didn't know what to do with that...but I hate wearing shoes. It is a luxury I have though to take my shoes off and know that they will still be in my closet when I decide I need them.) We found him some water in the church and asked around for some shoes. No luck. Nobody was even the right size.

Eventually we decided to drive Kolby to the Rescue Mission to look for shoes and to get him connected. Hopefully, to get him into a recovery program...but he would have to want it. And I am not sure he did. If my hasty judgments were correct, he was chronically homeless and chronically in and out of prison with a host of prison tattoos to show. I wonder how it all started. And I wonder if he even knows how it started. But that is not the point.

Colby wasn't shy or reserved like so many people tend to be. There was no way Betty would have ever gotten in my car, especially since there were so many of us when I met her. And it's not just her, there is a common thread of mistrust among people who are reduced to hourly survival. Admittedly, Koby was less than sober, but still. It surprised me.

So I wonder. I wonder why he let us take him anywhere. And I wonder if he really wanted help or if he just wanted us to feel good so he could go live his own form of life. I wonder if he was puzzled by us or if he had met us church people before and knew exactly what he had to do to make us feel like we may had made a difference so we could continue on to home and lunch and all of the constructs of a life that either he has no appreciation for or which had no appreciation for him at some pivotal point. School. Work. Bills. Family. Friends. Dinner. Get stuff. Get rid of stuff.

I cannot help but wonder if all of my intentions were misread for naivety, which would be true in part. (I have more curiosity and enthusiasm than I do experience.) Or if there was no reading into things at all and he just took things as they came. I want so badly to know, though, how it all looked through his blurry eyes.

Respite. (I apologize for the ironic haste of this post)

A little rest. A few dreams. A little art.

It is funny what creeps into my mind's eye and gets lodged there when I am not looking.

I have finally had the space and freedom enough to unclench and remember a little more of art. You know. The art that I loved and breathed and was before mechanic's classes and Bible College and Portland. It's been two years and only this week have I come to terms with how much I need to budget art supplies in because it is a matter of sanity and life and living...not a question of "

responsible stewardship" or whatever else I use to justify these last two years.

And so now that I have reclaimed my imagination. Or at least come to terms with it. Ya. I begin my summer term in...8 hours. Sweet. This is going to be interesting. Also, these are the saddest photos I have taken in awhile, but I start my summer term in 8 hours and have every intention of going to sleep...twenty minutes ago.

mild red

When I write about you

I will remember

your blackberries and roses,

your bridges and dog walkers

everywhere.

And everywhere filled with

your green.

Even the tree trunks have a layer,

and I am sure

that, if we dug deep enough,

your roots would proudly be so as well.

You are proud of everything you hold.

Proud of all that diversity

Proud of your high class

--your art and coffee and many activists--

proud of your low class

--your homeless and drugs and aired secrets--

proud of how they combine,

proud, even, of your shame.

But I love you

because you are home;

and you showed me

how to love even contradictory things.