done gone

Life always goes to seed if we let it. Here in the South especially, when we let things go mildew creeps in, its black spotted arms riding up your legs, vines, and not just kutzu, big, fat green vines come out of the ground an inch wide already, growing a foot a day with thick, wet spikes, ready to wrap around your chain links. They grow so quickly that if you touch them you get wet, puncture their membranes and you’ll find no substance, just pale green water held up by slipshod cell walls. They take you down to seed with undying roots, that no matter how often you cut them they come back. It is the fairy ring by the bus stop. It is the speck of rotten wood in the floorboard. It is what those of you who live in the cold have no idea about. You don’t know the constant onslaught of life that we fight. You don’t know what kind of shape we’re in when we give into it. You don’t see the insects, the way a sweet potato vine can invade the entire front yard, the way crab grass creeps along the sidewalks, and the way the vinyl turns greed with algae and mold.

But you do know this: something about these days has brought us back. Has made small houses and simple sidewalks seem somehow sufficient. You don’t know this but it has carried us down, removing the power of motivational thinking from our grasp and led us into a collective low, a sleep we’ve all been hoping for.


I’ve wanted to use this quote for ages. Ever since I first read it and upon remembering it later and buying a used copy of the book, The Way of Herbs by Michael Tierra. He writes in the introduction, “It seems that after a while, when people realize that they are alone and nothing will eat them, they begin the often destructive process of letting down their societal inhibitions; then we find the tendency of country folk to spend their free time drinking, getting high and ultimately making themselves sick. Through such ignorance we miss the incredible lesson that nature has to teach us, the lesson of how to just be.”