i’d like everyone to believe that i’ve had an innate and everlasting connection for nature, but that would be a lie. i’ve spent most of my life infatuated by urban life, and living in cities instilled in me a belief that most if not all things could be solved by human intellect and technology. one of the ways this manifested during my earlier years as an artist was my insistence that the social justice and identity-themed poetry i wrote and gravitated toward was far more relevant and had way more substance than conventional, frivolous poems, the kinds about “flowers and shit.”
i’m reflecting on all this while sitting in a garden that has been the only place where i’ve been able to find my inspiration to write for the past couple of months. without the motivation to compose for publication, without the assurance of human interaction in the near future, these plants around me that have been growing, blooming, withering, persisting – have been my primary audience and my only visceral indicator that the world is continuing on, worth writing for.
maybe i got old, maybe i got soft, maybe i got tuned in, finally.
last night we watched the 2016 film neruda, which focuses largely on the poet’s run-ins with chile’s power struggle, but not quite at all on his notorious love for gardening. that someone can possess the spirit of a revolutionary while at the same time mastering the stillness needed to thoroughly describe a flower is beyond my comprehension and beyond my discipline.
before the lockdown, as i was acclimating to life in los angeles, a burgeoning, favorite pastime was going on long walks with my friend sheng. “lookatdat one,” he’d chuckle, pointing out how the same thing that can make a plant beautiful can also make it hilarious (i guess the word for that would be awesome if it still meant awe-some). and as the hours passed, this awe-someness of nature seemed like the only thing that mattered, as if each bud on each stem on each root was asking, “what was that you were saying about substance?”