New eyes are all there is, the thing is in possessing them. When every day is wholly beautiful, in both the starting and stopping of it, takes some luck and takes a good set of eyes to see it.
Here it all is, this is all the fruition, working towards no fruit, just life done like my own garden, seeds sowed, transplants, going-to-the-store, planting with hope and dumb luck. When those Georgia collards unfurl they are beautiful, more beautiful than most things I could think to compare them to - frost passes over them and they are still green, untouched, reaching skyward thankful for the sun and - they don’t need anything. Sun, water, some good dirt, they go on and on, into the spring they grow glad. No flower, no fruit, just carrying on.
Then it is all there; life is all there, those paintings dreaming of the delta, all that writing and singing, all of those blues,
Washington Phillips on the road today off of the 61 highway, singing with his angels and cloud-guitar says
“take your burden to the Lord, leave it there … your soul is almost sinking in despair, He can save, He can heal, oh leave it there; if you can trust and never doubt, He will surely bring you out - God in heaven will answer prayer, He will make a way for you, He will guide you safely through, take your burden to the Lord and leave it there. Now if your useful days are gone and old age is stealing on, and your body sinks beneath the weight of care, Jesus will never leave you then, He’ll go with you through the end,”
The greens get cut leaf by leaf and boiled down and they keep growing. Folks used to eat poke sallet for poverty, and here I am letting those greens grow wild and growing poke for it’s pretty colors, too. The greens grow bigger than my old head, hands, shoulders, grow and grow, taking up their garden box, stretching happily every morning further towards the sun and, the credit is all theirs, I just carried them home, ancestors growing flowers for their beauty, greens for their produce, an old old old bachelor uncle, so old I don’t know his name, potted flowers in coffee cans on the road to his house, and here I am, growing collards because they are just so happy.
The all in all is, I am glad and I am grateful, in the strange hibernation of 2020; the very highs of the beginning of the year out barefoot on the coast in the old oaks and beneath it’s loving sky, to the sleeping that began in the summer, some days more awake than others, moving through but lazy; been hesitant all year to call it lazy, but that is it’s name. Once I am in the studio it is always good, when the work begins, like writing or singing or doing the thing in your ultimate soul; once you are living in the doing it feels awful good. Life drops away and the task at hand brings the mind to it’s heavenly cloud, all those burdens left back on earth or with God but they are left there. The eyes got old and tired, burdened, body burdened to where I hate the shape of my own shadow, forget mirrors, and silly burdens, carpenter bee burdens, daily road and old soy field burdens, old could have should have burdens, and then -
The clouds break; I am writing this to ensure that they break; they broke on my sleeping eyes, sleeping heart, sleeping mind, sleeping soul is what it is. Watching everything kudzu up with darkness and fear and anger, kudzu all over, not flowering and kind, just crawling and mean.
The clouds break, even in the cold of the delta land, I can type delta land here on it, the clouds broken over it in sunshine and I can’t be barefoot out here for the cold but I can still be glad and new-eyed and
On the trip here I worried it was too easy, each good trip marked and marred with a good toil or toll to earn the magic ahead, but I will take the cold, I will take the toll of self-appointed, self-carried burden, the task of shaking it off and moving forward into the light of the year and of life, here in the strange magic of the delta, that is the fee -
I can see the changes in myself over the past year, enacted I believe because of fear,
Other changes from the same laziness of self I don’t fight; so many years of self-hatred to the awakening of self love, last spring plunged back into the darkness of self hate seeping into interactions with other folks; that if the way forward is running it will eventually be running, but now it is walking and not changing the things I should change because eventually it will be changing. Too much of both, then both at once, left me here at the crossroads and
Here I am at those crossroads, or that night church yard among the gravestones,
Among the sleeping snakes and bright fake flowers, so many the churches with new graves piled in red orange dirt, and
Miring myself in myself is never anything; I have so much, I am so grateful, even the troubles of 2020 were not the troubles of sickness or death for the people that I love and I am thankful - reasoning and puzzling self-image is so small compared to the grandness of life, for the greatness of new eyes in a good world.
And I don’t know it seems like if a person gets risen up we all get risen up together, hand to hand, or smile to smile and
Lord help my hard luck soul / sorry old soul /