October sometime, 2021, before i kept better track:
Dried sunflower petals in the soap. Dried merigold petals in the soap. 5 miles to Merigold, Mississippi, on the 61 highway. The stars are always out there, hanging in the deep ocean of sky.
“dont the moon look lonesome shining down through the trees?”
I am not perfect, or best, in fact - I am in the worst version of myself that I have known so far.
We went walking this morning out to the field and there was dried soybeans hanging from the stalks,
And there wasn’t no lesson to learn there out in the soybeans, or in the shy road of old highway 61, just fall down trucks and trash and soon-to-be-harvests and telephone poles.
And that’s all right. Got here yesterday and fell asleep in the camper last night, and that floor of my soul feels dropped, like a cat in the sun, or a dog that’s been circling and finally laid down. Grounded, in touch - the sun coming up on a new day and I got my shoulders back and heart open and I can see the change coming. It’s been a long season of not-knowing, and then a shorter season of soon-i-will-know, and now i still-dont-know but with all of this, firstly - not alone here while the whole world still sits in stasis? Sits in waiting? And - one day we might know but the world just rolls on and doesn’t worry if it’s explained itself, and
i remember -
Walked out of the grocery store on the first day back here and there was smoke rolling out of the sky onto the pavement, they’re burning the fields, they’ve reaped what they sowed,
And it smelled like home-again, and this morning in the no-lesson-soyfield, we walked onto the old highway, and there was these bugs buzzing outside of the church (i remember asking late on a cold dark January night, “what is that building?” And you said “it’s a church,” and I said, “it hasn’t got a sign or anything?” And you said, “god doesn’t need no signs to know where His house is,”) and these bugs was buzzing but they looked like fog rising or ash falling, they looked like starlings in their dazzling whirling, and they looked like ghosts. Maybe the holy ghost. Buzzing and smiling around their many homes.
There where wasps in the camper which I swatted without mercy, I don’t know why I decided they needed to go - but I dispatched them anyway - six or seven, it seemed like they kept buzzing, but they didn’t ever come straight for me and I guess they were nonviolent wasps, but - they say in the country if a wasp builds its nest close to the ground, it’ll be a mild winter. If a squirrel builds its nest close to the ground it means a harsh winter.
Tiny white and purple and yellow flowers abound out in the prairie. Passionfruit still vining, I see pecan trees and hackberry, things that look like persimmon trees but I don’t see any persimmons. Black walnut trees, osage oranges, chinaberries.
Books caused me to be curious and that’s how come I got all these names keeping space up there in memory.
Worrying all the time I am closing in and closing up and being more “i” centered and knowing that the spiritual part of my life I was growing one or two or three years ago isn’t being watered, and I was doing better then, and now it might still be alive, and maybe life is just this continuous season of continuous seasons, and just marching forwards, and sowing and reaping and burning and sowing and reaping and
“you must remember you been once a child,”
Blues playing “you don’t know, you don’t know, you don’t know my mind,” plain and slow and steady. And a candle burning. And a cracked beer. And you. Wilbur in the bed sleeping or watching the windows and this fan blowing cold in the camper, and - it’s dark out here in the country, and quiet when the reapers aint harvesting and the crop-dusters aint buzzing overhead, and the mocking bird aint mocking, and the birds of all kinds aint singing their song and,
This old south don’t belong to a single person.
It was cold here in January but it’s so nice now. And in memory that warm and glowing camper seems like a dream, and it was, and it is, and the stars where still there in the sky, bright in the cold-dark, unworried.
The fall is falling down into another unknowing-season, and that’s all right.