A DIFFERENT SEA

Having just come off tour only 11 days ago, I’m totally shocked at how quickly I go feral. 

This morning I accidentally saw my reflection and it was like Bob from “Twin Peaks” was looking back at me. Holy FUCK! Is THAT me??? I was horrified. So much teeth and silver! Egads! 

No surprises really, I’ve been on high alert for too long. So many people have died. So many people are being set up to die. Less importantly, so many problems run screaming headlong into my barreling headlights like I am the great, greedy, trouble-eating black hole. My traveling friends and I marveled at every near miss and braced together forming a mesh to take the collisions. Our universe was very unstable. We just had to GET. THROUGH. THIS. TOUR. 

We did, thanks to everyone involved with that run; golden, every single one of them. Now I’m home and have a day off. Two actually. What to do? I look around at the verdant overgrowth and I’m completely overwhelmed. Where is my garden? Where is my porch?! After almost 20 years of learning about growing things, learning what things are growing here already and about all the creatures that depend on the things growing I realized I had to stop fighting. I’ve been killing myself just trying to see over the grass. “What’s wrong with seeing the grass?” I wondered, disgusted with how obvious all this was.

I have Virginia Lee Burton to blame. She always made the little farm houses in her illustrations so happy and cozy; all snugged in with perfectly round cabbages, tattoo-colored beets, and little jewelry fences, the scrapes of her charcoal on the page looking as if she had drawn the very dirt with pressed cocoa. There is a tidiness to this idealistic image of a farm that can only be achieved in real life with 14 children as forced labor – or severe mania, immense physical strength and stamina, and very expensive farm equipment. Mowing a slope is basically a fucking excavation job! In my experience most farms are pretty messy, and that is not a bad thing. And just because I had that realization doesn’t mean I was taking my own medicine. So, I threw myself into pulling weeds. A couple hours later I looked up from a deep grass cut in the webbing between my palm and thumb and thought What the fuck am I doing?! I know better than this!!!

Don’t get me wrong, I’d never trade in my love of Virginia Lee Burton and her soft, Fabergé farm houses. I thought of the tidiest farm I knew of which belongs to my friend Omri. He’s a wonder of a human being who can do anything. I remembered that he leaves all his grass and “weeds” and mows paths through. He makes the turns at interesting angles that give it a fancy park-like feeling. It’s just so smart. The paths take you on a little journey though the orchard to the barns, out to an old shepherds hut on wheels, past a large garden plot to a pond. It made for such a magical walk with my friends… how could I have forgotten? All this anxiety, I suppose. The world. I let the clump of sharp meadow grass fall from my other fist and looked up at the sky; clouds were forming on the western horizon. I scanned the waving, uncut fields and caught a glimpse of a very healthy looking deer on its sunset rounds. The terracotta hide blondly slid up and over a wave of grass like a lazy dolphin.The sea of grass at golden hour is anything but green – it’s pink, it’s caramel, it’s gold, it’s neon tomato juice, and it’s even blue.