MY DAILY BREAD

 

“They were calling certain styles by the name of lilacs and another manner assumed a verbal guise… metaphors such as these soaring from their lips while other street cries/sprang from sparrows finding scattered oats among interstices of the curb… and two of them croaked on the same day, if we employ the metaphors of their lips.”       - Carl Sandburg -

I fasted yesterday until four a.m. this morning when I woke up, and left my cottage serenely, walked to the direction of valley in supplication that when I reach her oasis, she may restore. My daily bread doesn’t always constitute food; I pray for “another” source of power released spiritually within me. And Mother Nature never lets me down: because I focus my body’s strength to its sublime elevation, I ain’t no saint, mind you, instead earthly use the transfigurative power of words to get by. It has always surprised me that choosing poetry as my “career path” didn’t turn out as bad for me as the odds against it were high, that I would be hungry and can’t sustain life with art. Yes there were Herculean struggles of the artist I had to overcome physically and emotionally in times past, but at the end of the day, or at my bottom, I made a blessing of what I’ve got (in my heart), (poetry), and lived til now. I don’t need a lot in my life; I have but only a few; books surround my home, and beauty handed down by nature to my table (like these beaming sunflowers), and they “fill” all the space I need. Of course I have a practical side, too, as a cook. I prepare greens as green as a deep forest image, portion them out on Sundays to last a few days as lunch for work and dinner when I get back, my long cooking chopsticks do so well in divvying up into bowls spread across the kitchen counter like banchans, glad to see my “daily bread.” These greens (like collards and chards and kales, simply braised in olive oil and red wine vinegar, a little kosher salt a little black pepper) are so nutritious I am injecting in my body not bulk but the “substance” of stars which created our planet’s abundant biodiversity of edible plants, and that is matter and energy in nuclear form in my stomach. I daresay I eat my words literally. (Please don’t try this extreme lifestyle at home, unless your “calling” is a life of monasticism through poetry). Very rarely that I sleep through uninterrupted when I have had nothing to eat all - but that night I took an oath to leave food to itself as to honor the primal concept of the food web shared by all species of earth, I never forget the lessons Mowgli (in Kipling’s Jungle Book) took to heart that beasts and prey can’t have it all, there is a time for richness and sacrifice, time for high and low, the jungle will never allow the advantage of one but everyone - and I slept like a wild boy in the cusp of a sacred forest tree, high in the balance of life, and woke up restored, inside out.