The Flower and the Belltower
Gather what can be gathered
Many years agone, my grandmother Rebecca shared an intimate story with me. The story was how she and several siblings shared a single bed growing-up in a very cold house. The house was extremely old. The cracks in the wooden floor conquered more domain with each passing year. It was customary to sweep the chicken feed athwart the spaces in the hardwood floor each morning. This was so that it would fall underneath the house for the chickens.
My grandmother’s mother was up earlier than everyone else each day. Rebecca said she could hear her chopping the weeds with a garden hoe and digging jakes for everyone to use before breakfast.
There were two colors of corncobs which were used to clean the hindquarters. The brown cob was used to get most of the mess removed and was thrown in the hole afterwards and buried. The white cob was used, and reused, to make sure everything was clean. And to that, as my grandmother would say, “a new day was begun and untouched.”
A new day can bring about a totally new way of thinking. Sometimes, for no other reason than we are just older. The American naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau said that if one can change their context they can change their perspective. This is true, excluding cognitive dissociation, perhaps. I do believe that age alone can change our context, however.
What happens when one realizes at some point in their life that they are at the very bottom? Is this not met with an egad exclamation? How long after that realization becomes a daily part of forethought does one begin to excogitate at their chances of making it out? What if one does make it? What happens next?
Let me tell the enthusiastic reader what happens next: a pinch-test! Then, after the initial pinch, another question: how long can it be maintained?
If one observes somethings realness, then it is real. A mere observation, to be clear, is all one needs. If one needs to kick a stone for a reality check then my recommendation is to first remove the shoe.
It is the maintenance that awakens difficulty. Maintenance is difficult with regards to where one stands with their belief in the realness of things. If one is walking through the woods contemplating whether or not they are indeed real, do they not still run from the mountain lion until they can reach a reasonable conclusion?
But one who is irrational and believes that they are not real, or they are questioning the integrity of their realness, may indeed get mauled badly or eaten up; therefore, becoming unable to maintain with previous enthusiasm what they have attained thus far in life. Do not become confused or question too seriously the realness of things. Focus instead on the maintenance of positive and meaningful relationships and the purpose of the things achieved thus far.
What if one day one awakens to a life where everything is so perfect; minus the little imperfections that amount to no more than trivialities? Of course, the pinch-test continues. Daily one may ask if life will make good use of them for another day. Life, is it not almost impossible? To dig a latrine each day, no matter the weather, and question nothing; only to question the realness of life at every corner once a better standard of living has been achieved!
It is extremely easy to become absorbed with one’s self. Gather what may be gathered from me like a flower gathers rain; only what is needed. And like a flower growing beneath a belltower, though it receives plentiful amounts of water, how much stress that tolling must cause such a small creature who is unable to escape. Alak! how the desperate flower beseeches each day the attention of artist’s and passerby’s to behold its suffering without any consolation.
THE END
