IN A GARDEN OR A VASE?

“Lived here all your life?”

“Not, yet.”

As open to sharing my love now as I have been at any time in my life so far, I feel fairly certain I shall never meet another person for whom I could feel such a complete love as I shared with Mary Gardner.

She was a bartender and I was a drinker. She was twenty and I was forty. She was the wisest person I'd ever met and I was an eager disciple. When it became apparent that we couldn’t get enough of each other in the bloom of new love’s discoveries about each other and the oneness we formed she gave me a book by Jorge Amado, Gabriella: Cinnamon and Cloves. The message of her gift I took from the situation wherein our heroine, Gabriella, is the best thing to ever happen to the cash register at Nacib’s bar.

Her beauty and lively warmth kept the seats and standing room full of his jealous and admiring friends, business was good. Nacib and Gabriella were in love and their mood had much to do with the respect with which his friends flirted with her and how safe that made her feel to flirt freely in return. It was win-win for everyone.

Beautiful story short: they got married, mood changes, business fell off, acrimony, misery —— Nacib consults his oldest friend who asks him to consider, “Which is more beautiful, a flower in a garden or a vase?” The simple metaphor was so powerful it may have had the effect of a self fulfilling prophecy on me in that, when Mary left to attend art school in Atlanta, I cried over the broken vase in a shameful display of attachment rather than be glad for her return to the garden of her natural habitat.

This post is inspired by the realization that this metaphor also applies to the threshold between the beauty of humans and the effect of putting their blooming evolution in the terminal isolation of the vase of civilization like some sort of Petri dish purpose cooked up by people who did not bother to understand that with which they fucked. Public education is a self-replicating pottery shed with no garden in sight.

I’ve missed Mary for thirty years now, glimpses of human beauty come and go with the vapors from the vase.

Like the tide follows the moon,
My spirits rose and fell
With the corners of your mouth.

Tearing the hook from my heart
I threw you back to the sea
To see you better reflect the sun.

You’re so unique —
Nothing reminds me of you
But what you've touched.

You've touched me
And my eyes see everything.

There is nowhere you aren’t.
You’re inside me
And I sail everywhere.

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This is a reprint from my otherblog, dualiytilaud, as I bring it to a close