The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing But the

Blog #21, Day #23 (all right I'm not perfect) of Fun-a-Day, where overly optimistic artists commit to doing art every day in the month of January. I'm doing the best I can.....
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I've been thinking a lot about truth lately, and a few lines from an Ani DiFranco song keep on playing in my mind: nobody's lying, still the stories don't line up. why do you try to hold on to what you'll never get a hold on? you wouldn't try to put an ocean in a paper cup. 

I think I pride myself on looking for truth, and in fact I've written about how I want my writing to be about that seeking of truth. But I am aware of a certain arrogance imbedded in that statement. Why would I try to put an ocean in a paper cup?

I come from, on one side of my family, a lineage of science. My father's parents were both plant scientists. Time spent with these grandparents, as a child, was not the most heartwarming experience, but it was always very stimulating intellectually. I learned about all manner of plant, and was taken to the New Alchemy Institute, as a teen, to get my first taste of both community living and sustainable agriculture.

I know that these folks, these ancestors of mine, lived their whole lives believing clearly in some sort of objective truth that had nothing to do with human emotion, or agreed upon meanings. For them, the reality of science was absolute, and in some sense ineffable.  I saw their knowledge of science as its own religion. I remember being both impressed and scared of my grandparents, because of my decidedly mutable truths, both in my youth and in my growing awareness that there was a bigness I could not understand, or really know, but only seek.

Maybe I envy my grandparents their certainty, and desire it for myself. But I'm not fooling myself, and I sure as hell wouldn't fool my grandparents. I'm not living in an objective world, not by a long shot. I've even, for a time, thought that farming could teach me objective lessons. That's no joke, but it is one. The methods of farming, the objectives of farming, the interests of farming, they lead to a million different choices and possibilities. One outcome can be brought about by many different paths, and each outcome will be slightly different. Farm research folks might disagree with me, but if nothing else, the weather is the great leveler of control groups.

Or maybe it's just that I don't have the patience to really know a thing. I feel a thing, I experience and internalize it, and then it is shifted in meaning through my own lens, my own need. God is much like that, for me. I need Her, and so she is, and in that sense, ineffable and mutable, both.

This is getting a mess, but I guess what I want to write is that perhaps I should take my stabs at truth, and know that really I am not holding anything in the paper cup but air. And if I'm lucky, I'm floating on the ocean, a drop of it, or a fish, in my element, breathing in the ocean truth, and not worrying if it will be there, or not, for my next breath.

An Ode to the Neighborhood

In honor of the city which I am visiting, tonight I post a poem about another city I lived in, Philadelphia. My partner and I often joke about how Philadelphia, and a particular neighborhood in West Philadelphia, is our ancestral homeland. We say this for a lot of reasons, but I think the biggest reason is that there we had the best sense of community and connectedness that we've experienced in our adult lives. It's hard to be away from it, though the choices we have made are the right ones.

I wrote this sestina in 2008, just after we moved away from the neighborhood. We moved away because I was following a job that made it possible for me to farm and get paid, a rare and good thing. But even though the choices were right, the missing was, and is real. Here's an ode to the neighborhood. I still miss you, West Philly.

An Ode to the Neighborhood, 2008

Monday mornings at the Satellite

café before I ever fell for a punk

kale smoothie or found a job, anarchist

dreams stirred my mocha. Green

monsters struck discordant rhyme, bicycles

flew over potholes at break-neck speed, and I was in love.

I'd never lived in a place that loved

you back. Other cities were a distant satellite

orbiting around the hot center of my longing. I'd bike

through Boston, Newark, Providence, feeling like a punk

in straight clothing, seeking out the green

center of life seething anarchic

hope—and find myself in endless pseudo-anarchist

meetings, hamstrung consensus blocked by love

less egos. Less radical activists in the Green

Party dedicated to their navels saw justice as a satellite

to their central passion—themselves. But here, punk

meets crunch, hipster meets play, and we're all bikers

we're all known to each other. Late night bicycle

posses take over our tree streets. Anarchist

collectives hash out their truths in  post-punk

movement organizing calling for a greater love

than capitalist competition. We know we're satellite

to the mainstream. We like it that way. Our greening

newness recreates itself with each attempt to coax green

life from brownfield, from abandoned row house. We build bicycles

from scrap, gardens from abandoned lots. We take the satellite

decay and breathe new life through concentric anarchy—

no gods, no government, each guided to each through love

of life splitting open all codes, all masters, all punk

odes and pacifist leanings lost in the world punked,

pushed aside for the inevitable twine of green

vine around the filthy palimpsest of blasted out blocks. With love,

you build something new. Neighborhoods with bicycle

collectives, food co-ops with wings, anarchist

meeting spaces, urban farms, and satellite

lives orbit the greater satellite of our punk longings—

for endless green on broken city streets, for anarchist rhyme to play on

low power radio stations, and for love to ride on a fixed gear bike down the hallowed halls of West Philadelphia.