Pine: II

“Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don't much care where.
The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.
Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere.
The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”

 ~Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

School was my nemesis. And every weekday morning, I was forced to look it in the eye. 

If I had lived within the pages of an Arthur Conan Doyle novel, school would have been my Professor Moriarty,"Motionless, like a spider at the center of a web." I was Othello, school was Iago, hellbent on the destruction of my 8 year old soul. If I had lived in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, school would have taken on the character of O'Brien, "One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship." Elementary school made the revolution and I became the brave revolutionist.When the teacher excused us for recess I ran like a felon fleeing the scene of a crime. I tried to rally my fellow comrades but they were weaklings who coward in the face of our dictators.

In the immortal words of one of my favorite humans to ever live on this pale blue dot, "Resist much, obey little." 

During my tenure as a juvenile delinquent I attended more schools than I can remember, they were all the same though, little boxes on the hillside. They came at me like an invading army trying to infiltrate the walls of my mind, walls that I had been building since birth, diligently stacking stone and mortar. They came at me with flickering florescent lights, raucous bells, absurd rules and work that I believed to be completely inconsequential. Dick and Jane have killed the brain cells of millions of children. 

My fellow cell mates rarely offered any reprieve.  As a matter of fact, if these were children then I was something else entirely. A displaced species. An alien, equipped with Strawberry Shortcake glasses, a field guide to insects and my stuffed Ewok. I was a spy. A finder of patterns and a collector of connections. Small ones lead to big ones, and big ones lead to small ones. I learned that from the universe. It is present in everything I see. We are trees.

The number of neurons in our brain are tied to the number of trees on the Earth. Neurons are trees. The axons, the sturdy trunk. The dendrites, which come from the Greek word Dendron, meaning tree, are the branches. The number of synapses in a neuron are bound to the number of branches on a tree.  Neurons create forests, their branches nearly touching. The life of every individual neuron is entangled with every other neuron. Trees in a rain forest.

A mystery bursting with clues.

They did not want to discuss this mystery. My conclusions led me to believe that most of them were devoid of even a sliver of logic, creativity or primitive reasoning skills. They had no interest in helping me to investigate this greatest of enigmas, the origins of the universe.

I would lie in bed at night, eyes closed, projected images playing out on the surface of my mind. Watching it all unfold over and over again. Backwards and forwards, what was before and what will come after? Colors swirling, objects colliding.

Ear shattering screams, pushing in lines, the mingling smells of sweat and artificial cheese.

I was terrified of the bathroom. I couldn't go if there was anyone else inside. So I stood in the hall, legs crossed, waiting. But I couldn't hold it any longer. I ran down the hall and out the front doors leaving a trail of shame in my wake. A block away, drenched in urine, I realized that I had no idea how to get home.

I was always packing. Always on the move. Ramshackle red brick buildings, laundry hanging from lines strung between the balconies.  It always smelled like curry.  In the back, there was a hill leading to a river. I made the ironing board into a sled. I rumbled down the hill, gliding into the water. The yellow house. I rode my bike into the garage door. It took two boxes of band-aids. The townhouse in the woods where we caught frogs. The house on a street named Marigold. The side cracked when the earthquake shook us like rag dolls. Home came in every shape and color. Sometimes I forgot where I was.

Intricate social structures. A maze nestled in a labyrinth. They left me dumbfounded and friendless.

The girl that always stood in front of me in line, clad in a flowing white dress. I was captivated by that dress. The way it caught the wind. The sun lighting it on fire. I always held up the line. Shoved forward by the boy behind me. She wore it everyday. I would have too.

She said that if I gave her my crayons she would be my friend. I traded the contents of my desk, one item at a time; my Punky Brewster folder and the indigo pencil box where my caterpillars lived. I put them in my pockets. so afraid that I was going to hurt them. I didn't have anything left to give her. The next week I walked home without my shoes. They were pink, she said that was her favorite color.

So I ran. And when they caught onto me, I stopped going altogether. I stuffed my backpack with as many books as I could. Sometimes I remembered to pack myself a lunch; peanut butter and jelly, triangles, no crust. The trick was to walk to the bus stop as slow as you could while still looking like you were trying. I would watch, peeping from behind a bush, as the bus pulled away from the curb. Freedom.

A park, a shady tree, the tepee I made by the creek. I read.

I'm still reading.

Some people claim that fire is the most powerful force on Earth. I say that it is art. It is a gathering of words on a page. The stroke of a brush on canvas. The silence between the notes. It whispers to you. Reveals a part of you to yourself. Another piece of the puzzle.

Art resides in the space where the known meets the unknown.  It is in that space that I became an artist. The architect of my life.  Where I learned that time is not linear. That our stories don't read from beginning to end. This is a choose your own adventure book and we are the authors. We can change the past and write the future. Where there was suffering, we can add meaning. Where there was loss, we can find joy.

Oak

"Women piece together their lives from the scraps left over for them." - Terry Tempest Williams 

You  reside in every atom that passes through me.
 You are nestled into my skin.
You are the fragile thread of twine,
that reaches far beyond time,
binding our souls with the divine,
Reverberating down the line,
 howling noiselessly through the Pine.

She was my soft place. Soft like the pink shag carpet that blanketed her bathroom. I think that her bathroom may have been the first love of my life. 

The bathtub was huge, big enough for a mermaid to dive for treasures in. To construct castles made from shampoo bottles and Mr. Bubbles. And when the mermaid traded her tail for human legs, she could practice shaving them with crazy foam and a hair comb.

Fluffy bubblegum towels; taffy tinted tissue boxes, lemonade shaded Dixie cups and the sound of sprinklers borne on a cool summer breeze.

No matter how many undersea tea parties or dolphin training sessions took place in my coral alcove, it never stopped smelling like her. Chanel No. 5, Scope mouthwash and baby powder. On the nights when the ghosts would find her, when her demons would take the form of flaming white liquid in diminutive crystal tumblers, I would lie on my belly and bury my face into the pink fibers, I would breathe her. This is what serenity feels like.

It feels like her nails skating across my skin. Every stroke carrying with it the feel of the bathroom floor. The world would stop spinning. Nobody spoke. Nothing moved. Stillness. It was present at Danny's funeral when I felt my castle crumbling all around me. It was there when fireworks exploded in the sky and overwhelmed my whole being. It was there when the space between dream and reality was so minute that I lost it. And it was always there the next morning.

I learned that most people, even good people, had a demon living inside them. Her demon would take control of her body. It used her mouth, her voice, to hurt those she loved the most. Demons tend to do that. It said that I was just like my mother, an ungrateful bitch. I wondered what my demon looked like and if I would know when it escaped. She never seemed to.

Rose colored light cleaves the darkness, chasing the shadows from my walls and the rancor from her heart. Carnation fingertips cut the ruby into equal halves, a sprinkle of sugar to sweeten the bitterness.

זַיִת

And God said, "Let there be light, and there was light. ~Genesis 1:3

The Universe is made of stories, not atoms. ~Muriel Rukeyser

 

Are words strong enough to carry the soul of a human being? To hold it up to the light? To allow us to see it, to know it, to become entangled with what resides inside? Words are all that I have.

I played him Tom Petty, placing earphones on my belly. He danced.
I read him my story. Every chapter that led me to him.
The day I heard his heartbeat was the day I started believing in fate and karma and destiny. 

On the day he was born, he stopped a blizzard and the sun shone as it must have on that first day. The day after the big bang. The explosion of carbon into the universe that gives us the right to say that we are made of stars.

In the nursery they nicknamed him peanut. A tiny little thing all curled up like he was trying to fit himself into a shell. We could not sleep. We didn't want to miss a single second of this journey. We stayed up and held him all night. We sang and we read and we stood in awe of every little toe and every magnificent yawn. Everything that had to materialize to bring us to this event in space and time. All the mutations and contemplations, the coincidences and occurrences. Love manifesting itself in the form of a peanut.

 I watched him like a hawk. His breath became my breathe. His heartbeat, my obsession. I refused to put him down and then panicked when he was unable to crawl. Every new noise necessitated a call to the doctor and every time he cried, I joined in. We went for a walk everyday. For the first time in my 16 years I was seeing the world in its pure and simplest form, undiluted by preconceptions or biases. To know a tree is to see it through the eyes of an infant. Everything became an expression of the eternal.

When he was 9 months old, he became ill. I was terrified. The doctor scorned me like a child. It was just a cold he said. But I knew that something was wrong. Animals can always sense the looming approach of chaos. That night I dreamt of the ocean. I sat cross legged in a tide-pool. The waves sauntering to and fro, covering me in Venetian blue. I was playing with a starfish. Feeling its suction cups against my hand. When it attached itself to me, I became a starfish too. I did not see the water coming to take me. I was dragged under. I lost track of my starfish. Oxygen vanished, I inhaled salt. I couldn't tell where I ended and the water began. I awoke, gasping. He was lying next to me, lips like sapphires, struggling to get air into his lungs. I wrapped him in a blanket the color of sky, clutched him to my chest, and ran to the hospital.

His first word was 'Baba'. It is Arabic for Father.

He got into the refrigerator and smashed every single egg onto our carpeted kitchen floor. Then came the chocolate syrup, the cream pie, and the butter. He was so proud. His first work of art. He flushed everything he could down the toilet, giggling as it swirled out of sight; keys, watches, jewelry, toys...He was flabbergasted at his ability to make things disappear.

He couldn't sit still. Life was too abundant . He couldn't stop screaming. Life was too electrifying.

He possessed an ardent love for the sound of ripping paper. Books were his favorite. By his 1st birthday, every book in the house had evolved into a new story. Stories of our own making. We filled those missing pages with our lives.

 Sometimes life imitates art far more than art imitates life

Then he lay down close by and whispered with a smile, " I love you right up to the moon - and back." ~Guess How Much I Love You 

When he played in the ocean he filled his pockets with agates. Soon, with pockets bulging, all his efforts would become focused on holding his sodden pants against his tiny frame. He would grab the Gaia's skin. Handfuls of minerals and gases. Countless life giving organisms. And pile it atop his head. He spent a lot of time engaging in activities, in practices, that furthered gravity's purpose. Fixing himself firmly to the ground. If it wasn't rocks in his pockets it was acorns. If not acorns it was garbage. Precious treasures disguised as trash along the side of the road. To him, everything held meaning. Every object was accompanied by an ethereal twin. He would have made the early Greek philosophers very proud. 

I hold an image in my mind. His pants are falling to his ankles, the waves on his tail. He is running towards me, arms outstretched. He is laughing. 

In the first grade he went on a field trip to a farm. An innocent red barn. Feed the goats, milk the cow, live in a time far existed from now. But it was there he uncovered the ugly truth, humanities separation of spirit and food. Unable to pull asunder Plato's two parts and betrayed by a system without any heart.

He never ate an animal again.

He berated a boy in his class for using a hole punch on a leaf. 

He despises people for destroying the Earth. He tells me that he can feel it suffering. It's too much.Show and tell turns into lectures on pollution and recycling. He spends his birthday at a mink farm protesting the killing of animals for their fur. He refuses to cut his hair, his nails.The neighbor boy steps on a snail and, as fire rages in his eyes, he tells me he hates him. After the rain, he runs outside to rescue the snails from the immoral feet of  human boys. He holds them in his hands with the same tenderness as I held him. Everything holds meaning. 

We lie in the grass together, heads touching, making pictures out of clouds. 

"Whenever you feel lonely and need a little loving from home, just press your hand to your cheek and think, 'Mommy loves me. Mommy loves me'". ~The Kissing Hand

He wants to be a superhero, He knows everyone of them by name. He knows their powers and their stories. He knows their struggles and their triumphs. If he could become one, his power would be the ability to make his brain hold still, to build walls around it like a fortress.

 He can't do homework. He holds his hands to the sides of his head, tears dripping on his Batman shirt, trying to keep the world at bay. He says that it feels like the world is screaming at him. He can hear the enthusiastic conversations taking place amongst the birds. Can he make out what they're saying? He can see the sunlight dancing around the room, finding a new partner with each object it touches. Is light a living thing? He can feel his weight against the Earth. How secure is his place on it? The tag of his shirt, the one that I forgot to cut out, is attacking the back of his neck. His nose gathers the smells that have clung to his skin; play-doh, cut grass and chlorine. Does grass feel pain? If he thinks about it hard enough, can he make his play-doh dinosaur come to life? A superhero could.

Every morning, his face still awash with dreams, rubbing the last of them away with a swipe of his hand, flexing his beanpole shaped arms with everything in him,"Mommy, have they gotten bigger?! Am I fuerte?!" Of course they have. Of course you are. He runs off to climb the highest thing he can find. The blanket that he had me tie around his neck, his cape, soaring behind him. He's off to his job. He fixes doors, like his dad.

We played Pokémon everyday that summer. He cried every time he lost.

 I walk by the stairs and find that he has put himself in timeout. Quivering chin tilted to chest. Watery brown eyes focused on tightly clasped hands. His posture dripping with disappointment. Just like a superhero, he has a very strong sense of what is right and what is wrong. He can't help but to tell the truth.

He refuses to take his cape off.

In first grade he's asked to write a story about a real life hero. He writes it about his dad. He tells me that when he grows up and gets big, he will marry me.

 "I'll love you forever, I'll like you for always, As long as I'm living, my baby you'll be." ~Love You Forever

His hair grows long. he tells me that he hates material things. He loathes money. He wishes that he never had to buy anything ever again. I'm afraid that he's growing up too fast. That his soul is too old for the rest of him. It's bursting forth. Reaching for enlightenment. it's left him open, exposed. He's four feet tall. A Buddha in a boys body.

We can't watch the news. It lifts him up and places him at the heart of human suffering. 

He's kneeling beside his bed. Bumper, his beloved stuffed companion, held steadfastly in his grasp. He's praying. Praying for the child that was kidnapped. Worried that she doesn't have her Bumper, that she's scared and doesn't have her mom to tuck her in. He's praying for the sick. The homeless. He's praying that the war, just a word to him, will not come to pass. I can feel the quakes. See the fissures. His fragile foundation, built atop a world that does not deserve him, is coming loose.

His best friend moves away. We're not allowed to say his name.

He gives all of his allowance to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. He marches for miles through the streets of Salt Lake City protesting the use of child soldiers in Uganda. He tells everyone that, as a child himself, he feels the need to support other children. I notice that toys are disappearing. I ask him if he happens to know where they might be wondering off to. He informs me that he's been giving them away to his friends, friends that have less toys than he does. I beg him to stop. And then I feel ashamed because I know that he's a better person than I am.

We mount our bikes and embark on grand adventures. He documents his world with a camera.

He doesn't understand why boys want to play war games, why they want to hurt one another. He says that they make him feel sad. He decides that he wants to be a girl. He wants to write and draw. To build instead of destroy. To cry when it comes and hug when in need. He has come to view boys as disheartening enigmas. All his friends are girls. He is adored. He becomes a God among mortals. 

At parent teacher conference I am told of his heroics. I'm also told that he can't sit still and he won't shut up. If he is not jumping up and down while yelling out everything he knows about a certain subject, he may be adamantly standing up for an underdog. He might also be staring at a butterfly and tracing its flight pattern in his mind, instead of working on an assignment. At lunch, he can be found sitting next to the kid who had previously been sitting alone. Or he may be using the tables as lilly pads.

I feel unworthy to be his mother.

 And the boy loved the tree...very much. And the tree was happy. ~The Giving Tree





We taped ourselves singing to one another. You can hear the river humming along with us. Its tune is much faster than ours. I can't make it slow down. 

.

I have my preconceptions.

When I see you, I don't.

I see myself, graphed and stitched to you.

I see me, trying to be you.

I will not see you.

But you will not see me.

We share our selfish eyes.

In yours, I am not me. And can't be.

In yours, I am you. Graphed and stitched.

You will try to be me. And I you.

I have my preconceptions,

And they are me.

~Olive

He makes a wish on every dandelion he sees.

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