I’m an hour outside the city and light years away from my world. I’m getting to touch my bliss, just a pinky finger touch, but it sends shivers down to the core of my jodi.
Driving up route 684, the Hutchison River Parkway, although I see no river at all, I see bushes, flowers, trees. Dozens. Hundreds. Thousands. And for the very first time – I see them, rocked senseless by greens that jump from white to gray to purple, that slide from chartreuse to forest. Dark evergreens bully their way through clustering yellowish youngsters. I’m grateful for the overcast day, air heavy & moist, making color damp & richer somehow.
How did the universe imagine there could be so many textures in a single color “green”, so many gradations and still be called just “green”? Pale morning lavender, wisteria hangs, the surrounding trees greener by comparison. So many variations and they all get to call themselves “tree”? This one with arms raised to the sky, hands full of tiny electric green offerings. That one bowed, graceful, swaying, thin vines closer to brown, but still, something we can call green. Shocking splats of yellow too bright to be buttercups, too yellow to be goldenrod, this neon yellow flower I have no name for. Underbrush, last fall’s dying leaves, rotting, composting, turning into food for these new shoots and leaves, nutrition seeping into the ground and rising up, over & over & over again. Season after season.
There is a single rawboned tree, no buds, no leaves, no blossoms. Impossibly elegant and spare against the sky. There are a hundred thousand trees overwhelming mountains ahead of me, thick and dense, unstoppable, unending.
I drive upstate, windows down, sunroof open, music off and nose wide open. The thick and dusky smell of mulch, of manure (from the truck in front of me?), of earth. Something heavy and rich like melted butter, it blends into vanilla and I’m drowning in it. I break the surface and there is the tinkling sweetness of a nameless flower, the lush richness of hundreds of flowers and I’m grateful again to have stopped smoking, to have my sense of smell.
God loves dandelions. Yellow ones and puffy ones. They’re all over. The universe does not understand the word “weed”.
God loves variation. He makes one thing in a thousand different ways, all different, all the same. Trees and flowers and shrubs. Gorgeous. Resplendent. Rich and growing, growing, growing whether I know their name or not, they grow. This wild yellow-green tree entwined through an old navy blue green pine, like strands of yellow pearls, they grow together, one providing shade for another, or strength, or something.
God loves change. I don’t, but the universe does. The universe understands life is change, death has a function, a purpose, an essential part in the plan.
God loves dandelions. No more & no less than he loves orchids.
God loves the tree wracked & split from lightning, grown twisted around its burnt parts. And God loves the lightning.
God loves green bursts of spring. No more & no less than he loves the bare bones and glistening icicles of winter.
This is my mediation. This is my conversation with God and when I say God, I mean Jesus, Mohammed, Yahweh, Buddha. I mean Isis and Jehovah, I mean the Universe and the microscopic, the Truth and the big bang, Zen and Sufism, the prophets and the poets. All roads that lead to Om, all ways out of the Monkey Mind. I face myself towards my bliss, listen and I hear the voice of God coming from trees, birds of prey, the wind that beats against my face and tangles my hair. Sometimes I have to remember to listen with my eyes. Or my heart. But the voice is there alla alla time.
1 thought on “up the country”