'cumber

A little produce from the planter. I wonder about the cumber part of the name, if it relates to the way the vines cloy and swallow all that they cling to in their efforts to find suitable anchors for their heavy fruit.

I wound up in Jackson Heights, Queens a few weeks ago and was astonished by the room-sized trellises many had built in their front yards. Those are my kind of people, even if their creations make the little thing I've rigged up look ridiculous. Made of three ladder lattices, it tilts to the side on its slim sticks, but the water bottle gourd plant, in a storm of growth, has taken it for all it's worth as it expands in every direction.

I'm a little shocked, someone suggested I get some kind of support hose for the gourds, I suppose to make little hammocks for each one in order to reduce the strain on the vine and allow the fruits to grow as large as possible. Talk about cumbered.

I don't think I'll be able to make a fuss about gourd sizes now, not with the new moon approaching and making my skin crawl with the folly of every sentimental bauble I've kept around until now. I'll take the gourds as gravity and the seasons makes them.

Janitor's Boy

In Maine this week I came across a Brooklyn artifact. I suppose they are everywhere if you know how to spot them. This one was in a book of children's poetry I picked up at the Goodwill in N. Windham. It was written by a 9-year old girl, Nathalia Crane, and published in a New York paper at 1922. It makes me feel nostalgic for "spicy trees" of her imaginary refuge. I like to think these two are still out there on an overlooked island in Jamaica Bay.

The Janitor's Boy

Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy,
And the janitor's boy loves me;
He's going to hunt for a desert isle
In our geography.

A desert isle with spicy trees
Somewhere near Sheepshead Bay;
A right nice place, just fit for two
Where we can live alway.

Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy,
He's a busy as he can be;
And down in the cellar he's making a raft
Out of an old settee.

He'll carry me off, I know that he will,
For his hair is exceedingly red;
And the only thing that occurs to me
Is to dutifully shiver in bed.

That day that we sail, I shall leave this brief note,
For my parents I hate to annoy;
"I have flown away to an isle in the bay
With the janitor's red-haired boy."

Deep Thoughts (for Independence day)

Internal politics & probably all politics stem partly from the aspect of the mind that has a habit of attempting to create reality rather than experience it. What is the natural state of being when some part of ourselves finally realizes that instead of perceiving the moment we are imposing a belief system on it and then experiencing only what we already expected to see? What kind of surprises do we meet when we take the lock of the world and see it for what it is instead of what we need it to be on account of all our hang ups? Do we have the courage to see the world and the essence of ourselves for what it actually is? Can we tolerate a fluid, ungraspable, undefinable reality rife with possibility? As soon as we decide it's one thing, we realize it is something else, or neither thing, or both.

Meister Eckhardt wrote that God is closer to us than our own skin. If we are to know that elusive but intimate friend, the mind and all its projections must take a back seat to raw awareness.

Something I found in my inbox today:

“…grasping, itself, actually is not at fault. That is the nature of awareness, that’s not at fault. What is at fault is holding to it. That is at fault, because when the mind is grasping, at the same time there is inborn wisdom that mind itself is not grasping.”

H.H. Shenphen Rinpoche, Basel, 1993

this week

I've been watching the tendrils of a waterjug gourd plant tighten into coils and anchor the plant as it climbs the trellis.

must. be. in heaven.

I read that when crafting an instrument from a gourd the immature gourd is sometimes slipped into a box so that it grows with a flat front and back but keeps it's curved waist. Part nature, part industry!

Yesterday at the Lincoln Playground I saw a very sad girl drooping in a bucket swing she was too big for. Among children especially, and adults too, you watch moods come and go. Still I hope all the kids have a great summer!