Sweet Potato Haircut

The recipe for Duck Soup is, as I remember, as follows: 

1 shovel for hole digging

1 bucketful of water (curbside rain puddles or sink sources each suffice)

3 earthworms (at least)

2 handfuls of greens (tree leaves, bush droppings)

1 palmful of berries (honeysuckle, holly, any bright dangling thing)

2 willing (or unwilling) arms for stirring

4 wild eyes waiting for the ducks to come

I can’t help but wonder if this is where we went wrong: learning so early that we could make the earth our plaything, laughing in our power as the de/re constructors of our own world, our earth which we could imperialistically stamp with our concoctions of soup and reconfigurations of dirt and worms. Did the worms drown? I didn’t even wonder about it then but I wonder now: did their bodies rupture with an influx of water so unnecessary and so fruitless? Though really it was full of fruit, the water, black and red berries bloating to the surface of the earth’s puncture did we wonder why the ducks never came? I think we were back to eating peanut butter and jellies in front of the neon screened television by the time the worms died, by the time the earth pulled in each snapped thing to its darkness, a burial for every day the ducks didn’t arrive. 

The Monkey Tree twisted through the deep shadows of the ravine behind my house, and on brave days we would climb it. I remember the darkness of the wood, the short searing of flame across my palms scratching against it, climbing. Rubbing against it, leveraging myself higher up in the world so as to really see, so as to find some sense of power in the height and the endurance. So as to play. Earth as playground and playmate.

When I moved to Michigan with my splintered heart and my bike I was not seeking a playground but a safe haven, somewhere to fly fast through the thickets and forests murmuring with wind, somewhere to lay my heavy body against the earth and dream pictures into the clear blue sky of another life. It was always winter there. The summer days when I was surely boiling through to my bones in my unairconditioned apartment, were still shrouded with the quiet solitude of winter, the dark reverence of sky and of silence steeping my waking hours and my winding dreams. Here I was playing, perhaps, in the woods where I walked each day, trails wild with human absence. In that small decidedly indoor oriented town where I spent my loneliest season I remember how the earth murmured nothing in response to my unrequited despair, how the earth would alternate mud and snow and dirt beneath my feet and I would slide, tread, run. I remember that the earth would never speak my name but would brush my raw skin with wind, would erode the self righteous rules I had been so certain of before, about love and living a meaningful life. I remember how the earth liberated me with apathy, the last thing I thought would ease me out of myself, reaching. 

I remember digging my fingers deep into the dirt and how there weren’t even ducks who lived on my street it was just a way for us to meet the mysterious earth with our own bodies, our own autonomy taking mystery and making it soup, making it something familiar and delicious. I remember entering the wild eternity of winter and how those woods would breathe their breath at me not like a greeting but a carrying on, a life carries on and you should too. I might amend the recipe for duck soup as follows:

Duck Soup:

Leave crumbs outside, for the ducks. 

Take your palms and unfold them, turned

Upwards, let the mystery hold you 

There is lots to learn 

In stillness.