rot and neglect

Lately, my teachers are rot and neglect.

Now is the time of year when you finally stand back from the mad rush and take stock. You pull your face back from the toil you've been lost in, you've thrown yourself into, and think, shit.

You spend months at camp, pushing yourself to become a better mentor, a better naturalist, setting goals, reaching them, going deeper into this world, and you come home and all your shit's covered in mold. Oh right, my stuff. 

You face forgotten relationships left to fester into conflict. You might have to fight at loud volumes in a car parked in a gas station parking lot, in the rain, in the early morning hours. You might want to break up. You might stare down the barrel of Going Separate Ways and start to cry and say, hell no, we'll keep trying. 

I've spent hours reaching a gloved hand under tomato plants where the ground is covered in the rotting orange flesh of sungold and green doctor and pinkish red slicers. So many that it's a scoop and a squish and a splatty thud into the bucket they go. This, in a garden that's been mostly untended, my mothers garden, ignored when my mother was unexpectedly called away from her Virginia life by an extended family member's sickness and death. With only one body, one presence, her tending of our beloved family in New England meant neglecting her garden in Virginia. So she went.

The remarkable part of all this is that for every 10 sickly sweet smelling, oozy tomato there's one who's perfect and ripe. They end up numerous, pounds and pounds. They -popped into a colander, brought in, rinsed, halved, laid cut-side up in a foil-lined cookie sheet, placed into a low-heat oven for hours, then frozen- will feed us in the cold months. 

The food we don't eat becomes food for the microorganisms who do our dirty work. Food for soil. Those microorganisms are who truly feed us, completing the cycle, making soil for us to grow food in next year. The food we have left, that we do eat, is -unbelievably- enough.

Remarkable, too, is how many of my friends I see replicating this pattern in their own way this time of year. Taking off. Soul searching wanders. Moving their tiny houses into the cool woods where they'll build themselves a fire ring and cook over it and hang little banners and care for themselves. After months of caring for plants, animals, sacrificing self for projects, the care moves back to the self.

The great thing about the neglect you discover in late August is that you shrug it off. The worst is behind us. It's almost September. You compost what's rotten (food for next year's soil!) throw away your moldy leather briefcases and ammo pouch hip bags (less stuff!) and jump in the cool pond as the sun's rays glow low. The hills rise all around you and your face is close to the water's rippling surface. You marvel at what water is. At how it could be that. You remember that the reason those things went untended is because your attention was laser focused on other things, amazing things, and those things happened and were grand. You remember every tomato that rotted was because you were hugging a bereaved cousin instead. You would let a thousand more rot. You know the things you did were more important than the things you let go. You get a bottle of whiskey, share it, rededicate yourself to your friends, your loves, your life, your self. You feel ready for fall.

One Cool Thing Humans Have Invented Is Language

Note: this post was written a couple of weeks ago.

I just got back from a grueling, horrendously full-of-failure but nevertheless emboldening and enlightening day in Ouagadougou. I spent the better part of 12 hours trying to accomplish a simple errand, and returned home empty-handed, exhausted, and covered in la poussiere.

La poussiere is a french word that I learned here, it was not a part of my life before arriving. Translated into English, it's "dust" but when I hear it or use it, I don't translate it into our english word dust, in my head. And I wouldn't confuse it with what we may call dust in the states. It's hot, dry earth in flight. On windy days, it covers everything, your breakfast, the inside of your throat, your clothes hanging out to dry.  It's also wonderfully cool and dry against sweaty feet, and gives one a feeling of great accomplishment in the shower to see it leave one's skin. It truly has its own identity and temperament, and lives independently in my head separate from any other concept.

An unforeseen boon from today's fruitless trip (besides getting to see a man literally climb all over everybody on a crowded bus while selling toothpaste…twice, the same man on two different buses. What is the demand for toothpaste on commuter buses.) is that I managed to pick up a French-Mooré lexicon. It's less dictionary and more language workbook. (Note: when I wrote that, I had only looked at the first two pages. The rest of the pages are, well, exactly like a dictionary.)

One thing that makes being human really pretty neat is language. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's the thing that being human is all about. And the coolest thing we as a species have ever invented.  Feel free to disagree with me in the comments section below, but your own words will be working against you, proving you wrong.  And while it's true that scientists continue to find we're not the only one's who had this bright idea (ex: octopi and other cephalopods, who communicate by changing colors and folding and unfolding their bodies, have been found to have both syntax and grammar in their communications) it is human language that continues to fascinate me each day. I have obvious biases. 

Nasaara, or white person, is the first word I learned in Mooré. I also learned that it's a totally normal greeting shouted to Nasaaras walking on sidewalks by adults and children alike. (But mostly little ones)

I've also been reading (and re-reading, and crying over) the way Hemingway crafted english that feels and reads like Spanish. It breathes a life into his characters and a fresh but gritty realness into the setting. 

Baarka means thank you, but it also means blessing.
So when you thank someone, you just say blessing.

In Mooré, the word for child, biiga, is the same as the word for grain or seed. I believe that the way a language is structured gives clues it gives us about the cultural values and understandings of the people who have crafted it over generations. This is what fascinated me as a student learning french- driving me to try and understand where a word or phrase came from, it's latin root, it's context in the fabric of the culture. This understanding, when I managed to obtain it, was truly the driving force behind my love affair with the language. This love affair ended long long ago, but unlike most, it could probably be reignited with a little focus.

For you non-francophones, the Mooré word for "to be" is bè. Cool right?

I am far, far, far from understanding how the language Mooré grew and lives and breathes. I can barely (but proudly) count to ten. But I'm digging the insight it can give me about a place and how the people there relate to it. 

The same word means to flatter, to trick or play a joke on, and to console a crying child. Think about that. 

So as I travel through life and time, I'll probably continue to geek out over the most powerful and beautiful tool we've ever invented. And the fact that we invented it everywhere…and everywhere, it's the same only different. 

Just like we are.