July 2, 2001

  • I will keep pounding on this damn keyboard until I get my message through...Hey, do you hear me?  Are you listening?


    While sitting in a coffee shop yesterday, I discovered a world as intriguing to me as that of any woman now in my life: a potted plant.  Yes, a potted plant.  Now, you may wonder if this is not just a snide way for me to indicate some tremendous and repressed anger towards women, some deeply gnawing angst.  Well, I must admit: not at all.  Women, for the most part, are still so intriguingly cool and totally interesting (especially here on Xanga).  It's just that this particular ivy plant growing in the window counter in a green 1-by-3 foot planter put me, for a moment, so fully in touch with my childhood's appreciation of nature that even my current feelings for womankind (which border, at times, I confess, from near total sublimation to infatuation) seemed slighted by comparison.  To be able as an adult to touch the sacred inner sanctum of one's childhood innocence is nothing less than a blissful blessing.  To be able to do so and describe the experience could be heroic.  So let me try.


    Some of the first clear, clean, free rays of the day's sunshine were washing this ivy plant whose existence, before my eyes, was transformed from a mere visual recognition of an external worldly object into a conscious wave of joyful appreciation.  Where first I merely looked upon the plant, I then began to see the plant: its endless details of uniqueness, the variety of its verdant shadings that would baffle the greatest artist in a quest to recapture, the otherness of its presence.  In essence, I was no longer merely looking at and recognizing a plant, but revering its vitality.  And this opened for me a path of imaging and imagining that so faithfully recapitulated some of my dearest childhood's dreams that tears were near at hand.  See this ivy plant: now a vast forest with tiers of impenetrable canopies that forever shields the virgin nurturing earth from the onslaught of penetrating light.  See the vine sprigs exalting upwards in luxuriant expression--more are they than mighty masts of a great ship upon the ocean for they bear the living  sails of a most intricate and irreproducible  architecture.  Lo, the plant is a cosmic alien with each leaf an individualized expression of its abyss-stretching networked life system.  Each leaf is more than a metaphorical match for an expansive earth ocean--more at, each leaf is a stellar Extra-Federation battleship sojourning by timewarp in the unpredictable lattice-net of space. 


    Of course, what was most entirely amazing was to be able to surrender to the freshness of this imminent moment so spatially near at hand.  Three feet between the plant and me with my full awareness awash with its existence.  If one could love a plant, that plant would have been in jeopardy of consummate worship.  In a moment of weakness, I could have made a sexual salad of it.  How refreshing to sometimes see the world (for this plant represented, without a doubt, a micro-totem fetish for all of the natural world's existence) from a radically alien stage of perceptual departure.

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