GARDEN STATES

by Hugh M. Lewis

The way is broad, reaching left as well as right.

The myriad creatures depend on it for life yet it claims no authority.

It accomplishes its takes yet lays claim to no merit.

It clothes and feeds the myriad creatures yet lays no claim to being their master.

For ever free of desire, it can be called small; yet, as it lays no claim to being master

when the myriad creatures turn to it, it can be called great.

It is because it never attempts itself to be great that it succeeds in becoming great.

(XXXIV, book one, Tao Te Ching, translated by C.D. Lau, 1963: 93)

I always gain great satisfaction from gardening and planting things and cultivating them and watching them grow. Whenever possible I try to plant a garden and grow plants. There is something therapeutic about putting one's hand into the soil to feel the roots of the plants, and to smell the chlorophyll of the leaves. It literally puts us in touch with one of the most basic and pervasive connections with earth being--the relationship between the soil and the roots of plants. Plants are such a basic part of the background that we usually ignore them and overlook the fact that they are living beings--things that struggle for survival in their own ways. This struggle only becomes apparent to us when we attend to their needs, and over time, cultivate them and watch them grown into their little niches in our world. We can see when one is healthy and one is diseased, and if we are very good, we can usually figure out why.

Plants in many ways are the epitome of earth being. They are earthbound and for the most part do not travel very much. Thus they are at the low end of the energy consumption scale. In fact they are indirectly the produces or processors of energy from sunlight and soil, and they provide us with our basic substratum of animal life--vegetable food and nutrients, humus and nutrients for bacterial action, and even air to breath. Thus for the most part, plants give back to the earth more than they take from it, and they represent in their basic stability a source of strength upon which all of life depends.

Humans are far from plants, but we have in our society nearly perfect analogies between plants as primary producers and animals as consumers and predators. There are many people who occupy the background of the social landscape, so common as to pass unnoticed, whose primary function in life is production. They work hard, ask for little, take whatever they can get, pay their taxes and obey the laws, raise their families. On the other hand there are many other people who achieve some status, who get more and the more they get, the more they seem to want. They come to possess and command great resources and wealth though they themselves can never use it in their own lifetime. These people can almost be counted on for not living in a manner conducive to earth being. It is the ethos of our system that we hold up as success symbols worthy of our emulation the latter category of "predator people" and we eschew and almost universally disdain the former category of "plant people" as something bad.

Now both the natural and the manmade world are more complicated than this simple dichotomous analogy allows for, there are many symbiotic and complicated relations in both orders of the world, but it does point up a basic difference between earth being and the kind of nonbeing cultivated by participation within the modern system. The former lacks wealth and largely eschews notoriety, the latter eschews humility and poverty, the former seeks stability and productivity, the latter seeks mobility and consumption.

It almost goes without saying that the most generous and friendly and polite people are the poor, and that the rich would not have become so if they were not stingy and basically unfriendly in the world.

A large portion of humanity has now been caught in a strange intermediate limbo. They are kept utterly poor, but they are also prevented from being very productive. They are a group who fill the bottom rungs of every social order and comprise a surplus, reserve labor pool. In their slums they are cut off from both sides of life--they have no gardens in which to grow their own food or to feel their vital connection to the earth. They have no jobs or income which would allow them the mobility and prosperity prized by the world system. They are in a sense an excess population, and their numbers are growing everywhere. A system designed to accommodate only a few cannot serve well or equally everyone.

It is a sad fact of modern development that my daughter is largely growing up in a world cut off from nature in basic ways. Since we have lived mostly in apartments, she cannot keep or care for a dog or cat or other pet. It is another valuable connection that teaches us the sentience and importance of our relationship to other kinds of living beings. She has had little access to plants, forests, fields, or gardens, in the way which I remembered growing up. Her life is found in videos and Sesame Street, in fancy new toys and children's books, in car trips to malls and grocery stores. I never had many toys when I grew up, and there were no videos. But I was always playing outside in nature, and we had many kinds of pets and we never missed not having toys.

You are a placid body of water

in a vast stormy ocean of shifting sand

The never ending flatness of the land

Belies the still depths beneath your calm surface

The long curving horizon of my vision

Comes to rest upon the lapping edges of your shore

As I sit quietly by your side

Meditating upon my reflections cast like stones

Concentric Rings spreading out from the center to the rippling banks

In the glinting of the sun and the darkness of the shadow

I wait patiently for some sign, for some secret indication

Seeking salvation in your silence, finding solace in your solitude

You quench my thirst, and relieve my dry, parched throat

Upon the water's edge I shall dwell eternally

And death shall be my constant companion

Sitting peacefully by my side.

Love is lost, youth is all gone

Words ring empty and hollow

The face has many lines and cracks

Beneath the mask the eyes are red and tired

We wake up in the morning because it is the thing to do

We have awaken so many mornings

It becomes a difficult habit to break

We sleep but sleep does not satisfy

We dream but our dreams are no longer enough

We stand and walk alone in the world

We stop and wait and do not really know what we are waiting for

We bide our time but our time no longer abides us

We run out of money, time, hope, and care

Our cups are cracked open and all the illusion has leaked out

And yet we continue along our way because there is nothing else to do.

A good poem is not easy to write

Said the professor to the student

There must be rhythm, rhyme and metered structure

Or else the poem is just a meandering stream of words

Going nowhere, except to the silent, anonymous place

Where all spent words seek the bottom

Paper tigers

Roaring pages

Paper Buddha's

In paper nirvana

Paper Professors

Avowed of the printed word

Paper reputations

Paper shredders and paper drives

Living in a paper world

of paper money and paper people

paper egos and paper Gods

A perennial plague of paper

With nothing to do

But crumple it up

And toss it away

Each piece so thin and cheap

This cup has fallen

And is so suddenly broken

Irreparable it is

No longer quite a cup

Not able to hold its essence

Its fluid is all spilt out

Your love sated in small and simple things

That you could hold and warm in your hands

And keep upon your shelf to collect dust

But you did not know how fragile it could be

How easily broken its attachment can be

The desks are all in nice, straight rows

Every morning we can expect an orderly and timely lecture

Beg your pardon sir,

But do you have the time of day

Can you spare me a little time, or even just a nickel or a dime,

And is it the correct time

Not a second to soon or late

To synchronize our schedules by.

Guru sitting under the tree

You are some one else’s swami

You wish to share a cup of Joe

And freely discuss the significant things of the day

But it must be fit neatly within your busy schedule.

Big Mizzou Lottery

People from all over the county, the state, the country and even the whole world

come to play here everyday

Wait in line and pay the cashier

Take your number

Wait your turn in line

There are ten dollar winners

twenty, fifty, even many hundred dollar winners

Who knows, you may even make the big spin

And become a manager of a Wal-Mart

or own your own McDonald’s Franchise

or even a copy service agent

At Kinko’s

Or become an student officer

In the ROTC

One of Busch’s Boys in Blue

Protecting the Uncle Reagan’s country

If you are lucky enough to dodge all the cars

In all the cross-walks

Buy a new computer

To calculate your life chance’s

And figure some scheme

Here you can make a little bit

Stretch a long, long way

You can even play now, and pay later

Upon your stairway to Heaven.

Just Charge it on your new Discover Card

Or pay for it on a Sears or WalMart’s lay-away plan

You are a Brahmin

And I, untouchable

You sit under your Bo tree

While I’m supposed to slave beneath the blazing sun

Your’s is the kingdom of Heaven

Mine is the Wasteland

Maybe in my next life-time

I can aspire to be like you

An equal among my betters

I will pass in anonymity

You might be remembered

Maybe in some future world

We will even change places

Can you imagine that?

Me the Blessed

and You the Damned

To be poor in an affluent world

Is to be a pauper among so many princes

A little Indian brave among Big Chiefs

Worrying about it too much

Becomes a joke you can play upon yourself

No one really cares whether you come or go

Shut off and isolated like a complete pariah

One’s life chances are likely to be quite poor

With few opportunities for social intercourse

People will call you a risk and a liability

An unreliable, unreformed character

In desperate need of reform

By shutting you off socially

Your image can be socially controlled

Sanctioned and manipulated

Without your slightest choice

Without a least little chance

Whether one chooses to play the game or not

I have resigned myself

To live within my lonely world

and to accept my meager lot in life

I find escape within my daily dreams

And seek success in the little things

I do for myself

I will take little from the world

And leave little behind when I leave

This common cup of clay

Its lips are cracked

It surface spotty and uneven

Molded of rough, soiled hands

Fired by wood from the forest

What it lacks in elegant refinement

It more than makes up for in utility