A matter of perspective

Have you ever thought about all the things that could go wrong during the day, but don't? A tornado that missed your property by yards; a lightning bolt that struck a nearby tree instead of the house; an auto crash avoided by seconds and feet? Don't most of us, most of the time take such metaphorical bullet dodging for granted? I've been pondering such questions  for the past few days, ever since one of last week's storms brought down a good-sized part of an oak tree that borders the back yard. It didn't destroy anything although it did come within about 20 feet  of the compost tumbler. But...

this is where most of the Three Sisters garden would have been planted

Photo by J. Harrington

Remember, if you visit regularly, that I was thinking about doing a Three Sisters garden this Summer, one that never got started due to weather, delayed repairs to the tiller, and other  complications? Guess where a large part of that unplanted garden was slated to be planted. You're right, precisely where the downed part of the oak tree landed. Now, I don't much care that there's a bunch of oak branches laying on top of grass and feral oregano. I would be mightily upset if, at this time of the growing season, it had flattened about two-thirds or three-quarters of the Three Sisters garden. The squash might have survived but the  beans, growing up the corn stalks, and the stalks themselves would have been wiped out.

at least it didn't flatten the compost tumbler

Photo by J. Harrington

I'm pretty sure there's some sort of message in this set of circumstances but, rather than try to figure it all out, I'm simply going to adopt a mantra written years ago by Samuel Beckett:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

That fits nicely with another observation I've come across a couple of times during the past few days. "It's not a failure if you haven't quit trying." Next year we'll try a Three Sisters garden on the hill away from the woods' edge.

Failures in Infinitives

By Bernadette Mayer

why am i doing this? Failure

to keep my work in order so as

to be able to find things

to paint the house

to earn enough money to live on

to reorganize the house so as

to be able to paint the house &

to be able to find things and

earn enough money so as

to be able to put books together

to publish works and books

to have time

to answer mail & phone calls

to wash the windows

to make the kitchen better to work in

to have the money to buy a simple radio

to listen to while working in the kitchen

to know enough to do grownups work in the world

to transcend my attitude

to an enforced poverty

to be able to expect my checks

to arrive on time in the mail

to not always expect that they will not

to forget my mother's attitudes on humility or

to continue

to assume them without suffering

to forget how my mother taunted my father

about money, my sister about i cant say it

failure to forget mother and father enough

to be older, to forget them

to forget my obsessive uncle

to remember them some other way

to remember their bigotry accurately

to cease to dream about lions which always is

to dream about them, I put my hand in the lion's mouth

to assuage its anger, this is not a failure

to notice that's how they were; failure

to repot the plants

to be neat

to create & maintain clear surfaces

to let a couch or a chair be a place for sitting down

and not a table

to let a table be a place for eating & not a desk

to listen to more popular music

to learn the lyrics

to not need money so as

to be able to write all the time

to not have to pay rent, con ed or telephone bills

to forget parents' and uncle's early deaths so as

to be free of expecting care; failure

to love objects

to find them valuable in any way; failure

to preserve objects

to buy them and

to now let them fall by the wayside; failure

to think of poems as objects

to think of the body as an object; failure

to believe; failure

to know nothing; failure

to know everything; failure

to remember how to spell failure; failure

to believe the dictionary & that there is anything

to teach; failure

to teach properly; failure

to believe in teaching

to just think that everybody knows everything

which is not my failure; I know everyone does; failure

to see not everyone believes this knowing and

to think we cannot last till the success of knowing

to wash all the dishes only takes ten minutes

to write a thousand poems in an hour

to do an epic, open the unwashed window

to let in you know who and

to spirit thoughts and poems away from concerns

to just let us know, we will

to paint your ceilings & walls for free 

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Please be kind to each other while you can.