Blue Relationships
Many years ago I walked the woodland conservancy trail in Hudson, NY. Then, I walked through grief, I walked through longing, and I walked into the future. Now I'm walking to fill time, a liminal space between appointed places. I find myself here unplanned. It's late afternoon.
I notice the familiar. The autumn sky goes lavender-gray brushed with the cobalt stripe of the Catskill mountains. The texture of herbage layering itself in love with another. Icy purple raspberry stalks loopy and thorny tangling with sprays of thin yellow grasses on top of fuzzy goldenrod gone to seed with abundant auburn bushes crowding one another and all of this panoply poke-a-dotted with yellow berries. It smells of spice and fecundity.
I notice what's new. Every twenty feet or so, a sign sticks out from the ground. Wooden poles with metal plaques with words. Butterfly. Grasshopper. I gaze to my left and fall into hypnosis unable to move my eyes away from a golden gleaming square emerging from the field. A sign catching the sun and reflecting back like a biblical altar sacrificing my attention. I cannot hear the seed pods whisper as I walk by or see anything beyond this maleficent sign that tells onlookers to notice what belongs here.
I see ahead of me an inanimate figure and try to understand. Is it two bodies huddled together? As I approach, I realize it's not two people but a larger-than-life flat sculpture of a cartoon squirrel. It distracts from the lone Black Walnut tree standing behind it, pomm-pommed with bright green balls holding sought-after nuts. Nuts that humans don't collect anymore because supermarkets supply easier foreign solutions. Squirrels reap our loss.
I walk. I wonder. Why have we littered this sanctuary with sanctimony?
Blueberries splattering citrine leaves, possibly poisonous. No, the berries are clustered, hanging from vines sprawled over the thicket. Grape leaves. Not blueberries, but grapes. A type of wild grape with blue and purple globes, not the typical purple grape color but an electric hue more often seen splashed on packaging announcing smashing flavor bursts.
The grapes grab me. I gather them into my arms. They are the same color as the glaze on the clay vessel I pulled from the kiln before walking here. When I first saw my vessel freshly made blue, it was unrecognizable to me. I had been slowly working on its form and had built a relationship with its brown and white clay body. Seeing it blue, I felt blue too. It had transformed overnight from something I knew to something other. Something suddenly unfamiliar. It's ugly, it's bad, I'm bad (my sad thoughts). It’s a shame we don't risk change, we say, and we might say it’s because of shame we don’t risk change.
Could I have missed these grapes, walking by unwittingly, if I hadn't seen my vessel dripping in these blues earlier? Could it be that the vessel wanted to be blue to show me something new? Could it be that this is the way the world talks to one another? Could it be that we unknowingly create what we want to see, meaning to be in wonder? Could it be I needed to be here now to recognize a new relationship to change?
I fill my vessel with the gathered grapes and fall a little in love with something earlier I was ashamed of. My brown and white clay vessel glazed in blue is beautiful holding berries in a shared hue.
Settled back at home, I discover the grapes are called porcelain berries. Porcelain is the purest of clays and comes from China as do porcelain berries. People here like porcelain but not these berries.
Unwanted and Unloved: Porcelain-berry! The title of the article written by self-proclaimed weed warriors on the Virginia Native Plant Society website. I read through the propaganda of native versus invasive plants and the techniques of how to eradicate the plant that’s described as “trying to take over the world” and “strangling the innocent native species”.
Not this again!
All places, all people, all beings are sacrosanct. All places, all people, all beings belong here now.
Can we reorient from barring and warring towards discovering and sharing the gifts inherent in our togetherness, even if at first all we see and feel is blue?