Stopping & Looking

Every day for a majority of the year, my face arcs across the skyscape of nine garden beds. Sometimes I bring a false rain. My eyes scan the canopies of intended and unintended planthood. The rounded leaves of the undesired purple amaranth. The heart-shaped leaves of cucamelons and their tiny tendrils reaching for an anchor to help them grow. The edgy, aromatic tomato leaves. Soft lobes of tobacco. The pastel of brussels sprouts. The yellow trumpets of the squash family. The waxy pepper leaves from which rain quickly sheds. The lettuces guiding the water to themselves. The dewy dill’s lacy green. The fuzzy peppermint sparkling in morning light. Here come my hands navigating the forest of foliage, my fingers following the tender stems down to the dirt where I gently pool white roots from their bed. Sorry, amaranth. Sorry, plantain. And is that a mulberry sapling? And I don’t have the heart to remove all the tomato and cucamelon volunteers. One of my favorite insects, the hummingbird moth, will delight in the extra tomato plants. Later this summer, I will watch the green finger that is their caterpillar bodies thrive or deflate as they sustain the lives of parasitic wasps.

I don’t know what I’m doing. It is the plants that know what they’re doing.

Having raised worms for the past year, I pore over scientific and spiritual texts about soil. I do know that human derives from humus. That matter and mother are connected (“She is the garden. There is no exile.”) I do know that bacteria—particularly cyanobacteria—is responsible for us having sustenance. I do know that the sequestering of carbon is due to mycelium hyphae. I know that introducing egg shells to the base of a tomato plant makes a sweeter tomato.

At the end of the day, dirt under my nails and my hair in every direction, I sit on my patio. Within breath-length is a pot of cheap annual flowers I got for $1 on Mother’s Day with the purchase of a bag of soil. Little violet and yellow florets dazzle, gently waving in the breeze. Well, look at you, I say as I narrow my gaze onto one flower. To imagine this flower is to imagine the colors and maybe three petals—a flower I grew up calling monkey faces. To zoom in within my imagination, there are some black lines funneling inward but into what, I do not know. But sitting here, paying attention to and actually looking closely at the flower before me, I see that there are not three petals, but five. Two lateral petals, two posterior, and one anterior at the “bottom”. Violet and yellow present, there is also a wash of paleness as if an artist added water to the paint. The lateral petals are symmetrical, the black lines similar on each side. These black lines serve a purpose to guide pollinators to the nectar. When I follow the vortex of black nectar guides, I am led to white bristles called lateral hairs. They attract pollinators all the while protecting the nectar from becoming diluted.

This. The whole above paragraph of detail and examination of a flower—not the entire plant, but just the flower—took a matter of seconds of simply looking. How can I claim to know anything at all if a simple flower face is but a creation in my mind until I actually look at it? And you can say that’s how everything is and you’d be correct. And this distresses me. Mom, show me all your wrinkles and meandering veins. Dad, your irises, the whorl of hair on your head. Before you’re gone. I look at my husband’s arms and I’m always shocked at how many freckles there are. In my mind, he’s not a fair, freckled man.

At the beginning of spring, I started a practice during some of my leisurely walks. Every ten steps, I stopped and looked deeper at things. This is how I noticed a specific species of flyfishing insect hatching in the wetlands and how these insects preferred to perch on privet. This is how I noticed ways water is held. This is how I noticed the movements of animals that came before me. The small game trails, the broken brush. This is how I noticed signs of movement and desire. This is how I noticed the unnoticeable snails, small as seeds, scattered all over the wet road, being run over by people who do not see them. Small bits of calcium carbonate and tender flesh dotting the road. This is how I noticed death and its spectrum of decay. The beheaded cicada. The quartered doe. The pale, limp crayfish. The small bird, smashed so profoundly like a translucent, pressed flower on the asphalt. Almost invisible, absorbed. Fossil-like.

Certain drugs alter the mind to the extent that the trails and patterns and details are present and dancing. The unaltered mind filters and siphons the details so that we can answer the phone, press the buttons, manage the frying pans, and turn the steering wheel according to our practiced gaze. So we can be productive and functional. But I don’t know, my little white dog with his damp paws stands here next to me and I count the curls of hair on one foot. 13 in all kinds of directions. In front of me on the dining room table is a decorative slab of wood centerpiece with a green glass vase. The slab of wood has bark on it and in the grooves there is lichen. That slab of wood was sold to me from a store and used at our wedding. A store sold me lichen. If I rehydrate it, that lichen will come back to life.

I don’t know anything, really, except that I want to keep doing this. I want to keep discovering the mundane. I want to continue being amazed by what I have always been looking at. So I will. Maybe someday when I bring my finger to the cucamelon’s tendril, it will touch me back.