There’s my grandfather in the garden. He’d spend countless hours out there in the tomatoes watching over them and making sure they had everything they needed, the way I watch the kids I’m assigned to at school. Each day after work, I walk home feeling beat, dehydrated and covered in the dirt of their feelings, it’s like I’ve been on my knees in the cucumbers for 6 hours. Maybe that’s why I love delivery too much. After making sure others are fed all day long I can barely lift my spirit enough to feed myself and just want someone to clean mine off and feed it back to me. Well, of course, it’s only when I write this poetry stuff I believe to be my kind of home and just as important to me as having a family and a house to grow old in, where that actually happens, I like to tell myself.
I think most of us, not just modern solitarian’s like yours truly, spend most of our time thinking about the things we don’t have and want, and half-believe we can reimagine these absent parts of ourselves concretely enough to either bring them back to us, shiny and new, or at the very least make them happen our way. To the hard-working, practical, and socially savvy, this might look like a beautiful new home we think we should have or maybe even had once, inside the dream, a place to grow old with someone and look like a poster for a mountain resort while doing it. But for the truly wise and intuitive this want isn’t something one has, but something one already is. It’s just drowned out by the noise and dopamine of hunger, and by extension, consumption, and its cousin materialism.
It’s why these last few years all I want to think about and be sensitive to is how my life looks like my father’s or my grandparents, how it compares to the lives of those who raised me and taught me there’s a difference between knowledge and wisdom, between wanting a life and being a life. When I think about my father’s apartment after he left my stepmother, I realize my own place is set up just like his. The small table in the kitchen he barely sat at is like mine that I use as a countertop when I need a place to put a plate for a few minutes before I take my food into the living room and sit in the chair that used to be his actually, and proceed to eat it, half-watching the tv and half not watching it, just the way he did, not to consciously remember him, but mostly just to feel like I’ve returned.
That’s a wonderful experience, the experience of return, at least to me it is. On the one hand, it’s just putting on flip flops the second you enter the front door after a long day of being under the sunlight of mostly other’s lives with only a wide-brimmed sense of self-compassion to protect you, but on the other hand it’s cooling the wound that can never close, relaxing into the broken heart and making sure the self, wherever it is, will still want to eat. On the other hand, it’s just being reminded and being so glad that you and others are still here to be picked.