[while walking]

the riches of everyday life

At the start of July I saw a pyramidal orchid for the first time in real life. At the place I work the groundskeepers have left swathes uncut between mown areas for walking and in those places I’ve seen so many wildflowers over the past three months. When you get down by the ground what might have looked homogenous when rushing or even just walking by fractures into incredible diversity of kind, color, size, form. And it doesn’t take a ton of space for this, either. I often think about the breadth of a street, and how many gardens, how many fruit trees could be made in that space. Imagine walking out your door to a vegetable and fruit garden of your own (imagine a redistribution of massive wealth such that having the time to care for and work in such a garden were not a ‘luxury’ but a part of everyday life). In my imagined city there are bike and pedestrian paths down the center, fruit and nut trees shading the paths, gardens between there and the houses. Bus and tram lines too but I’m not an urban planner, here; I’m just a dreamer, kneeling in front of a pyramidal orchid. But look what huge things can happen in such a little space.

Did your nose lead you through the streets until you found the source of July’s perfume? It is the linden (lime) trees in flower. Only for a short time—a week or two; shorter if it was unseasonably hot. For everyone, freely available, without cost: their scent is a shower of softness.

In gardens we may not own but rent or borrow, in friends’ gardens, in the places where plants escape the borders of the private yard and spill onto street or public path; on the grounds of banks and private equity firms; in the crack between pavement and wall: we can find and gather the riches of summer. (If you are in Minneapolis/St. Paul, and you want someone to find and gather these riches for you, Night Owl Farm has a beautiful flower CSA. It’s not cheap but what a gift—flowers every week for the price of a lunch out that week. Elsewhere, look for farms that do this. Great way to support smaller farms and to give presents that don’t need to be manufactured.)

What do the beings of the world say but that borders are fictions and that everything is precious? That life is always going on, all around us, and is infinitely interesting and complex; that the work of making meaning and of coming to understanding is endless and for everyone—could not be achieved by one person alone, or in one lifetime. These border-crossers know that ‘nation’ is a lie enforced by militarization and in service not to life but to wealth. They know that the networks of mutual dependence and reliance are everywhere and nothing living or unliving is outside of them.

The beings who live alongside us (including the human beings) also tell us that grace inheres in each thing, as it is, in the ways that it is, a grace that is not theological but intrinsic, theology being only one way to interpret what is always already there. Hopkins’ theology brings him to this conclusion—“Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:/ Deals out that being indoors each one dwells:/ Selves—goes itself, myself it speaks and spells,/ Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came”. The beauty of geometry and the unlimited curiosity it can teach us! “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare”—would I go that far? Maybe not, but I know the poet uses hyperbole to effect an argument, and I take her point. (Also, I learned this week that snails are left- or right-‘handed’.)

This city is a city of fruit trees: public plantings of plum, cherry, pear and hazelnut all drop their bounty to smash on the sidewalk and be crushed under the tires of cars. As I have walked over the past eleven months I have noted the places where fruit and nut trees are and mapped them, and in July I returned to plum trees—already covered in ripe fruit—to gather what fell. (I only take windfalls from trees that are private, or I ask at the door if there is fruit on the ground whether I could pick from the tree. And I shake public trees to adduce them to drop fruit for me.) From windfall plums and mirabelles I made four small jars of jam. I have to push back against the scarcity feeling when I gather this public fruit—telling friends on purpose where the trees are. It has to be for everyone and if I’m against its enclosure I have to be against my own desire to enclose it. There is more than any one person can use. And imagine if all the plum and apple and cherry trees in the back gardens of derelict buildings could be harvested? Imagine a jam kitchen for anyone to use. Imagine a café that served meals or treats on a pay-as-you-can basis, made with food grown in back gardens and on city streets. The world of plenty and of solidarity is already here, we just have to act as though it is. This world in which we could live by the dictum of sufficiency-and-no-more rather than by more-and-more-and-more is possible and we are part of it.

It seems impossible to me to walk without thinking about riches: in Dublin this is so because of what the financialization of housing has done, and also because there are banks and finance corporations and tech corporations and the trappings of extreme wealth, and because property is so prominently present as well as the dehumanization and abandonment of the poor. But it’s also so because the world itself is riches. Not marble nor the gilded monuments—what “lives in lovers’ eyes”, what is lasting and meaningful to me is the way that looking and walking makes me alert to ever more complex detail, the way observation teaches me to see that detail and its relations and to metaphorize and generalize from this, to understand structures and concepts in new ways, which again direct me to the world of things, material and phenomenal.

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August is almost here; September is coming. I’m planning to write, loosely, in the region of learning to write and teaching writing. If you’re reading this and there was a moment you can remember where a teacher changed your mind/your life/your practice about/of poetry or writing, or a reading you remember that broke your mind open in important ways, would you be willing to tell me in the comments?

Thank you for reading. See you next week!