saturday night, sunday morning

I should be directing my energy toward toast, buttered toast, but I stepped outside of myself last night and behaved inappropriately for my station, though I did not step so far outside of myself or behave so inappropriately that I cannot sit here this morning—it's pushing noon now—and compose my thoughts about what the heck anything means or is.  I wrote my personal letters already, but I want more.  I want to write about farm roads in Hadley, about the seagulls who come around in the spring and feed on the insects that get turned up when the farmers plow their corn fields, but I also want the pictures, and so that post must wait.  Leave something good for tomorrow, young man, or some such advice that people fling around in this world.  Pictures of the garden from early May of last year caught my eye.  

       
Gardens.  The damn things are too beautiful.  They are moody and various.  They live outside.  They respond to the weather.  They are demanding.  They are nuanced.  They reward work.  They also fool you.  They throw illusions into your mind.  You are beautiful because you made a beautiful thing.  My garden says that to me all the time, and I let it say that to me because sometimes I need to believe that my garden is right, that the best of my human spirit is there for the neighbors to enjoy as they pass by with their dogs, or their partners, or alone and with their own thoughts.  I thought I had more to say about this, but perhaps I don't.  Are we the gardens we make?  Can they speak for the harmony, peace and beauty that we want to exist in the world but which does not come into being of its own accord?  Is a garden a stand-in for a better world?  For me I think a garden is often a front.  A garden is many things, but it is also a fiction.  What do you do to tell the world who you want to be, not who you are in your entirety?  How do you curate the space around yourself so that others will see what you want them to see?  Does it work?  

I don't know when this blog became so ponderous.  I don't know if I am *really* this ponderous.  Is this just a space to be ponderous publicly?  Am doing some sort of service to the community by asking all these questions?  Last night I found twenty dollars on the street, and that was cool.  I was sprinting to the ATM to pull out twenty dollars.  The ATM was off in the misty distance.  I saw the money on the ground and immediately stopped sprinting.  Why continue to sprint when the world is paying you to stop?  It was very convenient to find the money.  I spent all of it.