Never Say Never

“I love to weed.”  There they sit, words I never thought to hear, much less write.  What’s happened?  Have I gone Zen?  What created this complete volte face?

The inner vision emerges from:  I used to be a pig-pen, food down the front of  clothes, books everywhere, papers in piles.  Having grown up in a family that generated emotional chaos, and a mother driven to cleanliness, I suspect that the easy way out was to unconsciously refuse any effort for order or structure.  But what is dis-owned must come home.

The outer vision grows from:  The confused uncertainty of a world where we thought we might have some control, to the knowledge that we have none. As the random mayhem increases, we reach for life-lines of normalcy and authority. Weeds and dirty dishes fill immediate requirements of not having to make another decision, and not having to learn a new technology in order to proceed.  As cyberspace encroaches into personal space, we may be more electronically connected but we are more emotionally dis-connected, mainly from self. The body is desperate to kneel upon green earth, and swish around in warm waters.

The weird pleasure of weeding and doing dishes is still foreign enough to make me laugh at myself…always a bonus.  I pounce on a weed as though it were Easter and I need first prize for the most eggs. Observing the destructive pleasure I feel in having power over those bad weeds, I uproot in the most ridiculous satisfaction and toss them into my bag, which at the end of the hour speaks of my fabulous productivity.  Weeding is my antidote to actually accomplishing something ‘socially worthwhile,’ which requires much more effort and thought.  At the end of the day, with nothing to show for anything, I have a bag of weeds.  That and my gnarly fingernails shall pave the way to heaven where I’ll know better than to ever say ‘never.’