Bloom or unbloom

There would be a picture of a lettuce seedling here but the new default seems to be to let artificially intelligent create one, so…

It’s been about two weeks since I tried to write something that could be said to be for a wider audience, however small. That was about the time where many sentient creatures, although not animals, did not know yet what sort of apocalypse the current US administration had planned for us, were wondering if the unhinged – not adults, not children, not animals – just the deranged creatures in charge,  whether they were going to do not just more of the unthinkable, but the unimaginable.

Except we could all imagine it. Or at least I could. And if I could, I guess that some others were also thinking of the worst scenario. I went to see someone dear to me, practically unannounced. We stood at the doorstop – they were busy – I thought – at least I’ve seen them. I won’t have that to torture myself with, at the last final seconds.

I was almost happy for them that they did not share my sense of dread.

The list of horrible acts over the last two weeks has been better documented that I could hope to do. But I think when even Paul Krugman, who used to be a fairly straightforward genius, appears to be unnerved, I have to recognize that it isn’t just me who rides some x/y chart of fear/time.

I tend towards canary in coal mine territory. Pointing out something unpleasant, I’m the messenger that’s shot. Have I mellowed with time? Age? Uncertainty? Yes, unfortunately.

But I listen to the people who mean well. It’s clear they are trying to help.

Others, more along the lines of the kindly meant, resort to head shaking.

I believe, or I want to believe, that all these people mean well.

And my approach to the state of the world is measured. I’m not bare breasted in front of the Russian Pavilion of the Biennale, demanding that the world pay attention to the sane washing of a murderous regime. Or a journalist, bombed in a building in Lebanon, facing death. Or a black congressperson being barred entry by a white sheriff to a committee chamber discussing his own constituency. The South – the ugly, disgraceful south, is dusting off its white hoods.

I still remember my first visit to a southern state when I was young. And I watched racism in front of me at the store, a white cashier telling a black customer to leave. I went back to my northern classroom and wrote about it. And my very white, very suburban type teacher, for all that we were in a city classroom, said to me

You’re exaggerating. It can’t be that bad.

I’m not sure who tells an 11 year old that they are exaggerating, but I imagine it’s the same people who are not telling a nearly 80 year old that he is.

I see complacency every day. It’s America after all, and I made the strange decision to go search for something – home? Love? Nostalgia? The future? In the countryside, land of pickup trucks and Trump flags, broken veterans and the addicted, staring at the closed mill on the far side of the river. A river that one of the locals told me her mother warned her away from, polluted as it was/is with the effluence of mills. The fancy hotel money built downtown doesn’t face the river. It faces the bar where the locals go, and the new art studios where a few craft lessons for the community will make up for the lack of a future.

My excursion into my past and the forests and the ocean hasn’t been a failure exactly. I am very grateful for the insights that watching the low information bubble, raised on shouts of USA and exceptionalism, ignore the desecration of democracy at their doorsteps because that could, never, ever happen. So it can’t be happening. And while bombs fall, and citizens are shot on the streets, people trade jokes – a funny meme of a monkey, or a person shredding a picture of a woman of color. Paychecks get paid in and weekends are spent cleaning the space money pays for, before returning to the vapidity, a buzzing in the ears that will not go away.

Yes there are pockets of dissent. Usually artists, or people who are trying to save the land.

But too many salespeople, worshiping money, claiming to do good, when really what they are worshipping is their access to wealth and power. Weakness on the coattails of abuse. As it ever is.

So where is home? I was isolated and abused as a child and it’s taken an extraordinary amount of years to even see it. I was ok – I couldn’t have been abused – there were still nice memories.  No visible bruising. My fears were my fault.

Until you realize you have been participating in a play and handed lines. When you stop speaking them, suddenly in the silence, the truth of the situation rings out, your bony feet rooted to the wooden floor of the stage. The mask falls, the costumes are revealed to be ugly, and you are left alone, playing to an audience in your mind. Frozen, until you gather the strength to pull yourself off stage. Maybe you walk through the empty seats where the audience was, and open the doors to the street.

And on the street, what then? You are free? Free to mistrust, to fear, to wish, to hope, to dream of a place, of people, or reconciliation.

I’m starting to feel that maybe the best one can dream of is a place where you feel most people at least agree with you on certain basic things. Education. Clean air. Freedom of expression. Freedom to create. Freedom to read, to dream, you and the cat and the dog, and not chase after or try to speed up what will change if at all, in its own time. Freedom to stop chasing. Freedom to go to a concert and not be told by a Finance Youth tech bro, this isn’t your demographic. Freedom to be met with kindness, even though finding kindness in a place where cruelty is commonplace, feels like slipping a message out under the warden’s gaze.

Freedom to recognize when you were happy. When you are happy. And as someone once said to me, there is not a right to be happy.

But there is a right to exist. Because here we are.

We are in Pluto retrograde season. And dredging/drudging through the mud brings up everything buried. Treasures and pain, witch places, memories and dreams, all dance, and stare at each other.

The waters invite you in, and the streets invite you down, and the daily diet of untruth that you have been resting on just won’t do anymore, no matter how many people preach caution.

They are right, of course, sage counsel, because there is no safety net. There is no space to run to.

I am not wholly innocent, and yet that should win for me the right to behave as others do – to find my own path and find that I am alone on it.

I bought lettuce and parsley seedings at the farmer’s market yesterday.

They both feel like a little bit of hope. Fragile, like the child I watched yesterday at work whose father was letting them play on a short brick wall – but the other side had a six foot drop. I fear for them.

My older plants are not blooming. They seem to have settled into waiting.

If home is in your hearts, then I would like to gather up everything that matters to me, and hold it inside/in a side, and run. Run, fast far, and leave everything else behind.

Like a prison held around us with threats and lies and corruption, we know we have to escape or revolt at some point/pont over the water, through to something new.

Or sit here, unblooming.