Week 16 - Built in Bethlehem 1961

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness - Alice Walker

   Leaving Richmond Hill this afternoon I spy our latest, most frequent cat visitor crossing the street, honoring the pavement with his royal paws. Confidence is a cat walking away.

   There goes a crow with a forked twig in its mouth. I've heard that if you feed and make friends with crows they will leave gifts on your porch - bottle caps, tinfoil burger wrappers, shiny ribbon.

  Huffle puff puffle huff up and down Libbie Hill steps. Don't mind me Mr Skink! A skink for every crevice, or a crevice for every skink? Here's a big one poking his head out into a sunny spot. 

  The other day when we toured the house with the inspector, I held open the door of the breaker box while he analyzed its contents. Through the back window I saw a well-grown groundhog poking his head through a broken down spot in the back fence. If we get the house I'm gonna call him Lloyd. If we don't get the house I guess I'll call him Lloyd anyway. I'm already calling him Lloyd.

  What do you call the sound your shoes make walking along a gravel path?
  
  Two men, who look to be father and son, silently fish off Chapel Island, sipping 24 ounce Natural Light. The fish are jumping after flies, just not their flies. Contentment is father-son fishing, luke-warm beer, lots of shade, little talking, few fish.

   Farther down the path a tree is full of tiny birds (I don't know a stork from a sparrow), quietly playing musical twigs. They don't seem to be eating or talking. Why do they keep trading places?

   Who is that goose honking at?

   Passenger train on the elevated track. All that shaking but the ducks in the canal aren't worried, dipping their heads after something ducks eat. The trestle "bent" (the load bearing frame between the spans) reads "Built in Bethlehem 1961" (or is it 1967?). According to Billy Joel out in Bethlehem they're killing time, filling out forms, standing in line. 

   Time to go home and clean some bathrooms.

   Check it out! An excited eight legged huntress in the bottom of a trashcan. Don't tell anyone, I'm turning it loose in the hall.

notes

• ...so well hidden has the act of birth become
• until the last moment I could not believe that a baby would be the result of what I was seeing
• only when these other children are safe in the world will your grandchildren be safe
• from the moment I saw that a plum grew out of a brown-colored, dry-looking branch, and a watermelon came from a green stem attached to a plant that was rooted in the dark earth, "heaven" as described by the pastor of our church became irrelevant...
• "relative, shift your teepee, Mother Earth needs sunlight"
• wisdom, however, requests a pause
• "No whirlwind, no reply; no burning/ Just a bare winter bush./ This is God, too.
• It is like/ sitting on/ a sunny pier/ wondering whether/ to swing/ your feet
• during the pause is the ideal time to listen to stories. but only after you have inhabited Silence for long enough to find it comfortable
• The distaste for hesitation. The absolute hatred of spending time in emptiness, what Buddhists refer to as groundlessness.
• it is hard to bear our own human thickness
• To be cared for. I said to my friend: it is possible for everyone on earth to have this.
• At this time in history, we are to take nothing/ personally/ least of all, ourselves
• If I could be happy in a land where torture of my kind was commonplace, then perhaps there was a general happiness to be found
• it is this love that never dies, and that, having once experienced it, we have the confidence always exhibited by well-loved humans, to continue extending this same love
• I cherish the study and practice of Buddhism because it is good medicine for healing us so that we may engage the world of healing our ancestors...they can only be healed inside us
• I see the Christ spirit in all those who cannot be bought away from their love of humanity
• To enumerate the crimes committed against the Mother of Humanity would drive the sanest person mad
• When I read these letters and poems and viewed the drawings, I was connected to those of our ancestors who first experienced the wrenching devastation of the destruction of their families. I felt in my own body the long centuries of slavery
• He was someone who, in a sense, was living, consciously, toward his death...Which is how we black southerners felt. MLK was not the only one who thought he wouldn't survive.
• Love your country/ by loving/ Americans
• Generosity toward those less fortunate is the way of the future, if a future exists
• tell them: I welcome you here
• I firmly believe that the only punishment that works is love
• "The only thing worthy of you is compassion"
• The beings we kill become, somehow, ours for life. Ironically, we become responsible for them in death as we were not in life.

Week 15 - A Good Antagonist is Hard to Find

Jesus: The Son of Man: his words and his deeds as told and recorded by those who knew him - Kahlil Gibran

   I'm late! It's late. I've sprung a motivation leak. Reading a chapter is like pedaling home with a flat tire. Dribbling drills with a flat basketball. If the eyes are the lamp of the body I've been putting out some dull, gray rays.

  There are a lot of great Protestors against Christianity and of religion in general, but who out there genuinely, with understanding, opposes the teachings of Jesus? (Most folks who I would claim oppose Jesus don't think or care that they oppose Jesus). Nietzsche is the only anti-Jesus intellectual I've spent time with.
  Gibran's Jesus is quite similar to Nietzsche's Zarathustra, supremely confident, embodying and calling out to the "greater self," as Gibran puts it. But Gibran's Jesus doesn't completely slough off the dead skin of "slave morality," as Zarathustra would have us do. Jesus condescends from the heights of spiritual enlightenment to help us in our mud puddle. But rather than teach us to transform our mud puddle into a garden, Jesus wants to lead us free of all mud - no more religion, politics, or economics - only beauty and truth. He's like a horse, like a spiritual Houyhnhnm; regal, beautiful, caring but alien, loving us to the point of death...but honestly too good for the likes of us.
   The voices of Jesus' adoring disciples are sharp and distinctive, but their recollections of Jesus and his words tend to blend and mush the flavor. On the other hand, the indifferent and antagonistic voices retain more of their distinctiveness when they describe Jesus.

Notes

• but when you heard him your heart would leave you and go wandering into regions not yet visited
• he knew the source of our older self, and the persistent thread of which we are woven
• be not heedful of the morrow, but rather gaze upon today, for sufficient for today is the miracle thereof
• and the Spirit was the versed hand of the Lord, and Jesus was the harp
• would that you seek the Father as the brook seeks the sea
• Himself a miracle wrought in Judea. Yea, all his own miracles, if placed at his feet, would not rise to the height of his ankles
• the dead in me buried their dead; and the living shall live for the anoited king
• no one shall open the floodgates of his ancestors without drowning
• you shall be held down by the chains of your own judgment
• all that was timeless before him became timeful in him
• he stood before the earth as the first man had stood before the first day
• men who carry their heads in baskets to the market-place and sell them to the first bidder
• there were two streams running in the heart of the nazarene: the stream of kinship to God whom he called Father, and the stream of rapture which he called the kingdom of the above-world
• the beauty of the day is not only in what you see, but in what other men see
• in every aspect of the day Jesus was aware of the Father
• Can it be that the Syrian is conquering us in the quiet hours of the night? It should not indeed be so. For Rome must needs prevail against the nightmares of our wives.
• And behind her walked Zion and Rome, ay, the whole world, to revenge itself upon one free man.
• the seasons shall tire and the years grow old, ere they exhaust these words: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do"
• when he uttered these words methought I saw all men prostrated before God beseeching forgiveness for the crucifixion of this one man
• it is in your longing that you shall find the son of man. for longing is the fountain-head of ecstasy, and it is the path to the Father
• but now I felt not the weight of the cross. I felt only his hand. And it was ling the wing of a bird upon my shoulder
• if lover were in the flesh I would brun it out with hot irons and be at peace. But it is in the soul, unreachable.
• must you break your harp and your lyre to find the music therein? or must you fell a tree ere you can believe it bears fruit?
• The childless woman too at her window, where frost designs the forest on the pane, she finds you in that symmetry

Week 14 - An Hour with Alice Walker

Good Night, Willie Lee, I'll See You in the Morning - Alice Walker

   I did very little reading this past week -- just a book of poems in preparation for hearing Dr. Walker speak this past Thursday. She opened the first annual meeting of the Center for Womanist Leadership. The conference took place over the weekend downtown, but the organizers graciously offered free tickets to hear Alice Walker Thursday night, and St. Paul's Baptist offered their ballpark sized sanctuary to accommodate the extra crowd.
   After her talk I had the feeling that I'd spent an hour or two with her. Certain things she said stood out - about the joys of aging, about the connection between revealing your wound and finding your medicine, about the upcoming release of Zora Neal Hurston's extensive interview with one of the last enslaved Africans to survive the middle passage - but more than any one thing she said, her tone of voice, her comfort level, her whole presence felt like a teaching.
   I've read and heard others talk about the "transmission" of wisdom as a full-bodied experience. The teacher walks the walk, in obvious and subtle ways, which makes it possible for the student to integrate the teaching into his or her own life. That's how I felt about her talk - she offered us some wisdom, mostly just by being who she is.

Notes

• unclench my teeth/ long enough to tell him so
• held his soul/ so tightly/ it shrank/ to fit his hand
• and if a hundred photographs survive/ each one will show a different face
• ...Voice/ to flatten the ears/ of all the world
• Don't let them fool you. He was himself a beginning/ of the new man. His love in front...
• But see how this saint too is hung defenselessly/ on walls, his strong hands pinned;/ his pious look causes us to blush, for him
• When next they looked they hardly noticed/ he no longer looked himself
• in the meantime i hang on/ fighting addiction/ to the old dream
• is forgiveness/ that permits a promise/ of our return/ at the end

Garden drama 4

Felix Culpa

    Eve liked to sweep the front porch in the evening. Any time of year she might find a stray leaf, mud streaks from her boots after a rainy day, a dirt clod from the grandkids playing; but each season the wind brought a different set of visitors. A new pallet of paint for the same canvas. 
   In the spring, pollen from the maples in the front yard came off in waves. Most days it was hardly noticeable. Other days, by lunchtime, the wind had swirled enough yellow over the blue-gray concrete porch that the postman left footprints walking up to the front door. Summertime might bring red dust from the clay fields just outside of town, if there was drought. June always brought a helping of cottonwood seeds, from the vacant lot across the street - white fluffs drifting gently, landing lightly to say, "hello, Eve." 
   She loved the spinning seeds the maples shook off in summer and early fall; she called them whirligigs, but her grandkids called them helicopters. Full blown autumn and early winter, of course, brought the majority of her porch visitors. Leaves leaves leaves. Red maple, with a few yellow elm leaves in the mix. Mid-winter was more leaves, and hopefully some snow! Snow was her favorite, and she could usually count on getting one or two flurries between January and March. The big snows were hard to come by this far south.
   The passing of the seasons always reminded her of what she had lost. And make no bones about it, she still felt it. The loss. Every single day. Nothing compared to the joy of the Garden, the wholeness, the presence of God. What about the love she felt for her children and grandchildren, and for Adam, God rest his soul? Yes, maybe that compared. That was the substance, the essence of the Garden. But in the Garden everything gave and received that strength and love, that mother's love. Every tree, every beetle climbing up the tree, every breeze blowing through the tree. Comparing the love in her life now to the love in the Garden was like comparing a nice bath in her iron tub with swimming in the ocean.
   Yet she adored the passing of the seasons. A new day brought a new gift. Would she give up the joys she'd experienced this side of the cherubim, if she could walk back through that fiery wall into her first life? She didn't have to make that choice. She liked to tell Enoch, "When you get old, you can have regrets without regret." And then she'd nudge him, "I hope you get as old as me one day." Which was an inside joke; Eve always said Enoch acted like an old man, even as a little kid. Enoch would nudge her right back, "Whatever you say, Grandma, I'll live forever if you want me to."
   This evening was a tiny bit chilly for April, so she put on Adam's old jean jacket. She kept the straw "porch" broom (as opposed to the identical broom she kept hanging in the pantry) with the other yard tools in the lean-to plastic shed just to the right of the back step. She had a little sweeping ritual, you might say. Broom in hand she walked down her gravel drive to the sidewalk, turned right and swish-swish-side-to-side in big strokes she quickly dusted off the fifteen yards of sidewalk in front of her house. She gracefully turned back to her brick walk and did the same double sweep up to her front porch steps. "It's me," she said, "who's here?" 
   She surveyed the porch. On the right, a white painted swing. Underneath it were a couple of twigs. On the left, two white painted rocking chairs. A few ants exploring here and there. A little pollen. A little dust. Not much to sweep really. A typical spring evening. For whatever reason, she preferred to sweep right to left, so she always started by chrysanthemums she grew in two old wooden tool boxes on the southern side, driveway side, of the porch. "Alright folks, thanks for visiting, but it's time to go home." Sweep sweep. She swept everything off to left side, into the hydrangeas she kept all along the north side of her porch and house, between her house and the neighbors' drive.
   When she was done, if it wasn't too cold, and it wasn't this evening, she'd prop her broom against a rocking chair and sit on the porch swing to say her prayers. Quietly she swung as she breathed in, breathed out, naming her family members - what a big family she had! - friends, neighbors, church folk, sad stories in the news, wars in foreign countries, anybody or anything that came to mind. She was done when she was done.
   She picked up her broom in the dusk and walked down the three porch steps, turning left to cut across the yard, under the bigger of the two maples. As she stepped over a root it seemed to move, shimmer, slither. "Ah!" She stepped back quickly, banged her heel against the offending root, stumbled and fell. By the time she lost her balance she was halfway to the ground anyway, so mostly she just rolled backward like a banana and ended up on her side. She took a few breaths and waited for the pain to start. Everything seemed to be okay. "I'll probably feel it in the morning." She laughed and sat up.
   The necklace she kept tucked under her blouse had slipped out when she fell. It was just a thin silver chain with a silver ring on it. Adam's wedding ring. She felt it, felt the grooves inside of it. The letters were worn down, and the script was too small to read in this light anyway, but she knew what it said. "Bone of my bones." She had one just like it on her ring finger that read, "Flesh of my flesh." She kissed Adam's ring and tucked it back in. She kissed her own ring and then reached the broom, using it to help her stand up. She patted the tree and laughed. "Shame on you, scaring an old lady." She walked back to the shed to put up the broom, smiling at herself, smiling at the tree, smiling at her fear, at the memories, at the past, at the present, at the future.

Garden drama 3

We Were So Young

   Adam knew it was time to spill the beans. He was beating around the bush, and he figured his counselor knew it.
  This was his third therapy session, and he was paying through the nose. Fifty dollars just to talk for an hour to a lady half his age? And that was cheap as she could go, supposedly. She called it a sliding pay scale or something like that. Course these days you can't buy a cup of coffee for less than two fifty.
   He could have used the Medicare, but then Eve would find out somehow, he was sure. Or maybe he should have gone to free clinic - they have social workers that'll talk to people - but that's where Lily, Seth's wife works. If she found out...if somehow anyone found out he was seeing a shrink...gosh, who cares anyway, he thought, nobody takes an old man seriously.
   Seems like a hundred years since he and Eve ran away from home. If he was gonna go crazy don't you think it would have happened earlier? Like when Cain accidentally put a load of buck shot into Abel's back on their hunting trip? Like when Seth was born and he lost his job and they lived for a year in the abandoned mill workers' barracks. Like when he got to drinking more and more whiskey every night and Eve threatened to leave? 
   They survived Abel's death; he found another job; he quit drinking, mostly. All these problems he thought were over and done with...all a sudden they're bundled up, tied up, tightly like a hay bale, sitting on his doorstep when he comes home. In the kitchen when he wakes up to make coffee. In his back seat when he looks in the rear view mirror driving to church meeting. Why now?
  "Durnit, six months till retirement," he cursed under his breath as he pulled into office parking lot. "Finally, almost free of this dag-blame job and now I fall apart." Nightmares. Bouts of trembling. Blackouts.
   Two months ago, driving back along Route 12 from the grocery, he blacked out on the curve over by Enoch's place, ended up in the ditch. A hundred yards more and he'd have tumbled down into the ravine under the bridge. Luckily Enoch was at home with his truck to help him get his car back on the road. 
   "You ok Grandpa?" asked Enoch. Adam waved it off, "Just caught a glare in my eye. You know how it is coming around that curve this time of day." Enoch nodded his head. "Yeah the sunset can get you. Hey Gramps why don't you go down to the doc, get yourself checked out real good? Talk to someone." 
   Adam laughed, "I'm only 70 boy; I ain't gonna let them take away my license just yet. No, you're right. Getting old will do a number on you."
   In his first two sessions he stopped short of where his sentences were heading. "Fruit, anything you know, like an orange or peach or apple, well it all tastes like ash nowadays (because when I look at it I'm back in the orchard)." "It's that, I can't look Eve in the eye anymore (because she looks more and more like Mama everyday)." "It's been fifteen years since I touched my wife in bed (because I never could do it lying down, and there ain't no way I could do it like we used to, not anymore)."
   Adam sat down on the therapists couch. "Thank you Miss, uh Miss Jah, I really do appreciate your help - I guess I'm just a silly old man - Do you mind if I lean my head back and close my eyes?"
   "Of course, this time is for you," Mrs Jah said. She was so calm and confident; Adam didn't know if that set him more or less at ease. "You do what you need to do. Why don't we pick up where we left off last week. You were telling me about your mother, Eliza, right?"
   Adam leaned back. "Yes, but we just called her Mama El."
   "It's so hard to remember my early days. We, me and sis, we always called her Mama El. I dunno why. She was so good to us. We had so much freedom back then, rambling all over the farm. Mama El could grow everything, not like me, though sis got some of her talent. Sis got a lot from her, ya know." Adam sighed. "Durn it, Miss, I can't, I, well, I got to tell you." Adam opened his eyes to look at Mrs. Jah and shook his head. She raised her eyebrows to invite him to continue. She didn't seem worried.
   "I been hiding from you, from everybody. Me and Eve. My wife. My sister. She's my sister too, I think. I married my sister. Well I don't guess we ever rightly married." Adam clenched his folded hands and tapped his forehead. "Now you call the police and tell this ugly old man to get out."
   Mrs. Jah leaned forward slightly,  "Mr Eden, I'm here to help you talk through what you need to talk through. I'm not surprised by what you've said. You've been hinting at that. How does it feel now that you've told someone?"
   Adam shook his head again. "I don't know. I just can't deal with it anymore."
   Mrs. Jah, "What do you mean by "it"?"
   Adam, "The whole thing. What we did. Mama El. Looking back now, I mean, she was so old. Was she even really our mother? Or our grandmother? Where was our father? We didn't know nobody but each other and the animals till we ran off, although I guess Mama El would tell us stories about people and cities and things. It's all just a haze and blurry memories. Except for the orchard shack. Mrs Jah the orchard shack's killing me. Seems like more and more every day, especially since I turned 70, the orchard shack is coming back to torture me."
   Mrs. Jah, "Why don't you start by describing the farm?"
   Adam, "It was a big farm, I remember, or maybe I'm exaggerating I dunno. Pasture, corn, I have one clear memory of a whole acre of okra in full bloom, milky white petals with the deep violet inside. Anyways it was a peach orchard on a hill a good ways back from the farm house. A little cart path crossed the creek past the corn field and curled around the hill. Up on top it flattened out and right in the middle was an old migrant shack that we used to play in. That was our favorite spot, you know, me and sis."
   "Kids grow up. Things change. I've seen it with my kids and my grandkids, acting strange when they hit that time. What happens? We were best friends, sister-brother, how could we do that? You know I used to think that when we was young, we each had a little bump down there, and then I grew out, you know, and then she grew in. I used to call it little mr. snake; I bet you can't believe that."
   Mrs. Jah nodded, "Yes actually it's pretty common for young boys to come up with funny names for their penises." Mrs Jah waited. Adam's hands, still interlocked, were shaking, but he kept going, slowly, taking deep breaths along the way.
   "We were so young, though. I don't even know if Eve had had her flow yet. Neither of us know our real age. We just make a guess. We had been swimming in the creek where it bends by the hill and gets deeper, a little past the ford for the cart path. She ran on up ahead to the shack. I told her I was gonna skip some rocks, but really I wanted to play with mr snake a minute. I guess it had started to feel different. This time was even more different. It got real big real fast. I half ran half stumbled half in half out my overalls, up the hill into the shack. Eve was undressed drying off in the sun, her dress on the windowsill by the back door. It was like the first time I'd ever seen her. It was like a different person.
   "I remember saying, "What do I do with this?" And Eve said, "I think it goes in here." Then we were beside each other, standing up. We was the same height back then. I pushed and she pulled. We barely went in, ya know not even one time; it hurt her. But all the touching felt good to me. The stuff started coming out in waves I couldn't control all on her stomach and thighs and right then Mama El comes in with a pitcher of sweet tea and three glasses. How could we not have heard her? I remember those drinking glasses so clearly. Blue glass, painted with little golden angels carrying swords and blowing trumpets."
   "Her face was so sad, so heavy, I never seen such a lonely face, like we had put the weight of the whole world on her shoulders. Now that I've had my own children, sometimes, I think, maybe she was just sad that we had grown up. I wish more than anything I could talk to her."
   "You could see the tears coming. 'Dear children," she said, but before she could finish we ran out the back door, fast as we could down the cart path, past the house, past the front pasture, crossed the road, down into the little pine forest, both of us crying. It was like we couldn't think straight, couldn't remember nothing. Sis clutching her dress that Mama El made and that little towel, me carrying my overalls. The first night we slept in a cabin, I guess maybe a hunter's cabin, but something inside of us kept telling us to go, go, run away, run away.
   "We came to a town; stole some food. We made up stories about who we were. Then another town. One thing after another. But, but that orchard shack. That look on Mama's face. That feeling we felt, that we had to keep running away. Keep staying away." Adam let out a deep breath, hands still folded, rubbing one thumb with the other, and bowed his head. He sprinkled a few tears onto his loafers.
   Mrs. Jah sat in silence with Adam for a couple minutes while he shook his bowed head, rubbing his thumbs. "That is a lot to share, Mr. Eden. That is a heavy story to carry around for so long. We can end our session now - we are just past an hour - and schedule you for next week."
   Adam nodded, "Yes, thank you." He lifted his head up and gulped in some air. Another sigh. "Yes, thank you," he repeated. "Next Wednesday I'm taking off work to go fishing with Seth and Lily and the kids up at the lake. Just a little day trip. Could we schedule for Thursday afternoon."
   Mrs. Jah, "Let me check...yes Thursday at five? Okay see you then."
 

Garden drama 2

Judgment Day

   The only thing King El liked about Judgment Day was the beard oil. He didn't care for the heavy robe, the pompous procession that tradition insisted on - trumpets, the high priestess and her lamp, the chief noble and his golden scales, the warrior and his sword. He didn't like sitting for hour after hour on the stone Judgment Seat in the middle of the city gates, in the heat of the day no less (of course he had attendants with shades and fans, but still...it gets hot). He hated all the bickering between brothers, accusing neighbors, resentful lawsuits, the pitiful pleading of widows and orphans. Blah blah blah. Why did I conquer this country again?
  But the beard oil, that was his Judgment Day solace. Except for old uncle Jah, El surely had the most beautiful beard in the land: black as night, long as his arm, thick and curly as strongest wool. And after his maidservant oiled it into ringlets and tied three golden ribbons at its base, El truly felt like a king. The sun shimmered along its glossy black curls and jumped off the golden cloth.
   El sat on the stone seat, really just a square rock, and the high priestess called out, "The flame of truth!" Then the chief noble, "The scales of justice!" And the warrior, "The sword of judgment." And King El, stifling a yawn, with a disinterested wave to the crowd, "My word is law."
   "Your honor," said the head secretary, "first we have three petty thieves, by name, Adama, Evela, and Snaku, who were caught this very day, in the act of stealing from the royal library."
   El, who loved nothing more than sitting in the garden with a novel, perked up as the soldiers dragged three skinny peasants and threw them to the ground before him, "Really? I was just there this morning and didn't see anything missing. What section was the book from?"
   Secretary, "Law and ethics, your honor."
   El, "Ug, boring, no wonder I didn't notice. Remind me the punishment."
   Secretary, "Immediate execution."
   El turned to the warrior, "Well, you heard him, chop chop chop."
   Somehow Snaku managed to slip the gag out of his mouth, "Mercy your honor! Mercy oh bearded one!"
   The soldiers moved quickly to silence Snaku but El felt like humoring him. "Hold, I will hear his appeal."
   "Oh King of Kings," crooned Snaku, "full of goodness as glorious as your beard, we three lowly peasants only sought to taste a morsel of your great wisdom."
   El raised an eyebrow. "For what would you need wisdom? You know your work; peasants have grown olives, grapes, and wheat for thousands of years."
  Snaku nodded his head in the dust, prostrate before the King, "Yes yes of course, your Majesty. But we thought, we thought that, oh Father of Justice, that we could better serve you if we knew how to act as righteously as you do. If we knew the law of good and evil, then perhaps we could love mercy and do justice in your honor."
   El almost laughed, "Clever boy, you have a smooth tongue. More likely you want books of law to learn to govern yourselves. Besides, who taught you to read? That is a crime in itself, is it not?"
   The secretary interjected, "Indeed it is, your Majesty, punishable by twenty lashes. But these criminals waste your time. They were caught in the act."
   "Thank you, Secretary," said El, frowning. "I'll decide what is or isn't a waste of my time."
  Snaku, "Oh Mercy, King, beard of wonders, forgive my curiosity. I love to read, as I have heard that your Majesty does; my late mother taught me the alphabet. Oh please, have mercy on us and descended to spread just a little of your learning and law. Perhaps we ignorant subjects will cause fewer problems for you."
   El stroked his beard, sighed and looked off at some circling buzzards on the horizon. "There may be something in what you say. For your cleverness I will spare you and send you into exile. Your dumb friends, however, must die."
  Snaku rose to his knees, his arms bound but outstretched. "Thank you thank you oh great King of all bearded Kings, but have mercy on my friends! It was I who talked them into seeking this book. I promised that I would teach them to read and hoped we could spread the knowledge, always to your glory, of course! Have mercy!"
   El was ready to move on, "Fine, but only because I like you, you, what was your name? Snaku. But you must pay for your friends' lives. Cut off his hands and feet! All three are exiled into the wilderness. My word is law. Next!"
   The the cords above Snaku's wrists and ankles were already as tight as possible, and the warrior's sword was sharp and his cut clean. Adama and Evela carried Snaku all the way to the little wilderness village beyond country's border. They lived in peace, as far as possible, and Snaku started a school for the village children, teaching them to read with the handful of pages he had torn from the book of law and hidden under his tunic.

Garden Drama 1

The Good-Bad Tree

    Crow flew straight. "Caw caw hurry hurry!" Over the tree tops like an arrow. "Caw! This time of day, El's got to be by the swimming hole," she thought to herself. Sure enough, there he was, on his favorite rock, dallying his feet in the deep end.
    "Caw Caw! El! Big trouble! Snake and Eve are headed toward the Good-Bad Tree!"
    "Hey Crow," said El, still watching the trout dance in the shadows of the overhanging cedar boughs. "What's that you say?"
    "Caw you heard me! Snake's up to old tricks! Come quick!"
    "Oh Gosh, what now. Okay okay. Go on ahead, will you? Keep them out of too much trouble? I'll be there, just a minute."
   Old El just couldn't rush. He couldn't hurry if it was Judgment Day. Every birthday, by the time he made up his mind what to wish for, his candles had burned down and all the ice cream had melted (which Crow didn't mind; she preferred melted ice cream).
   So off she flew, poor Crow. Somehow she always got the people watching assignment. El often told her she was the most observant of all his friends, which puffed her feathers and made her feel good. But, just as often, she wished El would ask her to watch over the beavers, or the ants. Even the mice would be better than humans! Anyone other than Adam and Eve! Caw! One of these days she's gonna tell him to go watch these children his own self!
    Quickly Crow arrived at the Good-Bad Tree to no sign of Snake or Eve. "Caw caw! Anybody home?" Surely some winged kin was nearby. 
   "Chirp rrrr chirp! Hey Crow," said silky purple Martin.
   "Caw have you seen Snake or Eve by the tree?"
   "Rattle chirp yes even just now, and guess what?"
   "Caw! Don't tell me!"
   "Chirp, yep they picked an elppa."
   "Caw, everyone knows it grows upsidedown for a reason!"
   "Chirp, I didn't think even Snake would be that foolish. I rattled my shameful-est chirp, but they wouldn't listen. Maybe if Bluejay had been here, he could have scared them."
   "Caw, can you help me find them?"
   "Rrr chirp they headed down the deer trail, toward mossy hollow; they just had to show Adam their shiny new fruit."
   "Caw, people! You stay here and wait for El, if he ever shows up, and I'll round up our lost sheep."
   Crow was faster than El, as usual, but struggled to keep the trio - Adam, Eve, Snake - underneath the Good-Bad Tree. Adam and Eve were behaving quite strangely, running around snatching figs and peaches, then running back into the forest to stash them. In between hoarding they tore off the Good-Bad Tree's scratchy leaves and held them over their waists (the worst place to put a scratchy leaf). They kept averting their eyes from each other and from Crow, turning their backs, stumbling and dazed as Sparrow that time he flew fullspeed into a pine cone. 
   Snake, on the other hand, was his usual snakey self: one minute laughing, then throwing an acorn at Squirrel, then picking his nose, rolling his eyes and sticking his tongue out at Cricket.
   When El finally arrived, he had what looked like an entire cane brake piled up in his arms.
   "Caw! El! What are you doing!" cried Crow
   "Hey Crow, looky here!" said El. "Mrs Possum was telling me that if you peel off strips from these reeds and weave them together, you can make all sorts of things. Necklaces, baskets, chairs, beds...Now what I'd really like to make is...
    "Caw! El!"
    "What? Hey is that Adam? Eve? What's going on?"
    Adam, his back to a hemlock tree too skinny to hide him, and Eve, crouching behind a rose bush, shut their eyes, hoping that might make them invisible.
    "Oh no, Crow, oh I see. The Good-Bad Tree," said El, dropping his cane and finally catching up to the situation. "Oh my."
    See, the Good-Bad Tree is a funny tree. It's upsidedown. Its roots grow up toward the sky and its branches grow down toward the ground. The leaves cover the ground, and the fruit hangs up and looks like an apple, but it's upsidedown, of course. That's why they call it an elppa. 
   Once curious Tabby Cat, rubbing up against a branch of the Good-Bad Tree to scratch his back, asked El, "What's the point of this tree anyway, old man? Seems silly to have fruit we can't eat." 
  "Well," said El, "We made all kinds of fruit and nuts for every kind every bird and creature to eat and be healthy. But we thought to ourselves, what if someone gets mixed up and thinks Good is Bad and Bad is Good? What if someone gets afraid and won't share any food? What if someone gets really angry and won't talk to us? We wanted a fruit that we could give to someone to instantly turn them around. 
   "But I've told all the animals not to eat from the tree because if they eat it while they are healthy, it will make them feel empty and sick."
   El tried to coax Adam and Eve back from the brink, "Hey, just follow me over to the Good-Bad Tree and we'll get you back to your right mind." But all they heard was, "I never want to see you again." 
   El said, "There's plenty of food around here, don't worry!" But they heard, "You will never have enough." 
   El pleaded with them, "You each made a mistake; you don't need to blame each other," but Adam said, "It's all Eve's fault!" And Eve said, "The snake tricked me!" 
  The more El walked towards them, the more Adam and Eve ran away. "At least let me make you some clothes!" he called, but it was too late.
   "Crow, dear Crow!" cried El. "Please help. I can't let Adam and Eve run off alone and naked into the wilderness. You know out there is a different world."
   "Caw! Don't you put this on me! I did all I could. If you cared so much you should have been watching them yourself. And besides, shouldn't Snake have to fix the stick he broke?"
   "Snake! You sneaky devil you," said El, turning on him with a scowl. Snake just giggled and turned a back flip. "Ug," sighed El. 
   "Snake, if I gave you the sneakiest feet in the forest, so sneaky they don't even touch the ground, would you follow them for me? All you have to do is keep them on the run. Sooner or later they will run into another Good-Bad Tree." Snake blinked, or was it a wink, you never can tell, but El figured it was as good as a yes.
   "And Crow," said El, "if I blessed your eggs and spread your nests all across the wide word, would you watch over them for me? Remind them to look up in the trees. Eventually they will find the fruit that heals them." Crow said, "Caw! It's about time I got something out of this people watching! I'll keep a close eye on them, El, don't you worry." 
   So Snake got his sneaky, invisible feet and slithered out into the wilderness, and Crow flew straight to catch up.

Week 13 - Jesus Super Natural

The Color Purple - Alice Walker (she's coming to Richmond on Thursday!)

Luke, Chapters 1-7 - R. Vinson (Smyth and Helwys Bible Commentary)

    Today has been the grumpiest Easter ever. Bah bunny humbug! I woke up an irritable grouch, and it looks like I'll go to bed that way. I'm glad it wasn't my morning job to fly over and roll the stone away; I'd have slept in and left Jesus knocking, "Ok...I'm good...anytime now!" Can't you see him twiddling his super-shiny resurrected thumbs? "Come on Dave of all the mornings to be dragging your feet."

    Several Resurrection related thoughts circling each other...

1) the Gospel writers, brave and bold in describing a variety of miracles and dramatic events, don't quite describe or narrate the resurrection (as does Gosp of Peter). From a story-telling perspective, beginning the resurrection with an empty tomb is surpassing brilliant; from a spiritual perspective, profound and beyond. How much can we learn about our Gospel authors by what they don't say about the resurrection?
 
2) Paul gives us a little bit about what he thinks - Jesus was raised from the dead with a spiritual body - definitely a physical body, but alive in a new way. He kinda describes it negatively. Not corrupted. Not perishable. Jesus was transformed, as we will be. In Mark and Matt Jesus says that in the resurrection people neither marry nor are give in marriage, because they will be like the angels.
 
3) I've enjoyed reading some of the historical Jesus debates about resurrection. Everyone agrees there was nothing as simple as a "resuscitated corpse." Oh good!
 
4) Paul and other theologians understand Jesus to have overcome or undone the archetypal sin-curse of Adam and Eve and restored or surpassed the original paradise.

5) In Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, Pagels says that in one of the gnostic amplifications of the garden story, Adam and Eve are described in sparkling, god-like terms - shining feet, giants with their heads in the heavens.

6) Mr ______, Celie's husband in The Color Purple, sins every which way - abusing two wives and multiple children, then gets a little taste of divine judgment and punishment, then repents. As an old man trying to live right he tells Celie, "I'm satisfied this the first time I ever lived on Earth as a natural man. It feel like a new experience." That reminded me of Dante's experience in the garden of Eden, on top of Mt Purgatory.

7) Dante, having climbed the mountain where the pilgrims work off their sins, has to walk through a wall of fire to enter Eden. Virgil motivates him with thoughts of Beatrice on the other side. "Then he smiled as one does at a little boy who is won over by an apple." And after Dante passes through, Virgil proclaims, "That sweet apple which the zeal of mortals goes seeking along so many branches, today will bring peace to your hungers." 
   Not only has Eden, with Adam and Eve, been restored, but the symbolic fruit itself has been redeemed. The fruit now represents a healthy, blessed desire. "...your own pleasure now take as leader: you are beyond the steep ways, beyond the narrow...free, upright, and whole is your will, and it would be a fault not to act according to its intent." Still, Dante is not yet to heaven.

8) Where there any heretics who claimed that Jesus was human "filled with the Holy Spirit," then after death God raised him into orthodoxy (fully human, fully divine)? Ebionites? I might be one of those.

9) Who stresses the natural-ness of resurrection? Did Jesus become more natural than natural? Supernatural, not in a spacial sense (above natural) but as an intensification (really really natural). Jesus the super-natural, super-spiritual, super-real, super-supper.


notes
The Color Purple

• It be more then a notion taking care of children ain't even yourn
• Trying to believe his story kilt her
• Some be dress too. Some don't hit on much.
• Nettie steady try...
• long as I can spell G-o-d I got somebody along
• streetcleaner
• I feels like Who Would Have Thought
• His little whistle sound like it lost way down in a jar, and the jar in the bottom of the creek
• white folks is a miracle of affliction
• By God, I miss you, Celie. I think about the time you laid yourself down for me. I love you with all my heart, Your Sister, Nettie
• Hard to be Christ, too, say Shug. But he manage.
• We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God?
• Let 'im hear me, I say. If he ever listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell you.
• Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he ain't.
• Crazy as betsy bugs. Nothing built this crazy can last.
• Well, say Sofia, mama fight the good fight. If there's a glory anywhere she right in the middle of it.
• I'm satisfied this the first time I ever lived on Earth as a natural man. It feel like a new experience.
• And you know how some whitefolks is, won't let well enough alone. If they want to bad enough, they gonna harass a blessing from you if it kill.
• Can't be rule. Every nigger you see got a kingdom in his head.
• ...stood up with him/her [at a wedding]
•  a look of _____  (a lot of)
• Let her quit, say Sofia. It not my salvation she working for.
• Us look round at a lot of people's knees