Something from Nothing
I have built many lives for myself and I have torn them down. I have built versions of myself, perfect ovals and squares, and have flattened them like clay. I’m glad I’ve had something to abandon, people, places, habits, myself.
Sometimes I get worried that the next thing won’t come. That if I quit the version of life I am in that nothing new will come to take its place. But I suppose the thing about space is that someone or something is always waiting to fill it. There’s a new guy, a new house, kitchen drawers waiting to be filled with utensils.
When I have let my plants wither and die in the sun of my front porch, a very gruesome way for them to die, something eventually will sprout from nothing. I will walk by a raisiny succulent to find a strange little cream-colored mushroom that has popped up or a volunteer from the young trees planted in my yard.
I guess the mushroom has to come from somewhere, that may be the organic matter from my once flowering plant that has now melted into the soil created the perfect home for the little mushroom or the volunteer tree gets on best in dry moldy soil.
It’s nice to know that something can come from something else that has been turned into nothing. My little paintings of cats can sprout up on a blank page with only an idea, some people would call an idea nothing but I would call it something. Some people would call people nothing but the ideas they have and hold.
My ideas of yesterday have given way to my ideas of today. Old ideas have died to make happy soil for the ideas of today, like my old dog whose buried under the tree in my parent's driveway. He did not have to die to give fuel to the bald cypress that was planted above him but I'm sure in the grand gruesome scheme of nature it helped. It’s nice to think of him there near the driveway as a large soft tree instead of a pile of old bones and one chipped canine tooth pressed deep into the earth.
My dog never thought he would become a tree and I never thought I would grow into someone who is happy, but I guess we all get surprised in the long run.