the wisdom of a fern

i take two sips on my coffee before the fingers press. building worlds one tiny symbol at a time, is remarkable to me. here are lines that we've learned and processed and made our own individually but share collectively. here is the power to create, to fashion something out nothing, to sculpt the air. i am truly amazed at the writing craft and every now and again i gauwk wide-eyed and open jawed at this beautiful artform. it is like seeing a person, really seeing a person, having over looked him for days, months or even years. and so i'm here writing my ars poetica i suppose. there is a story stored up in these finger prints like there is love in this body, but i cannot help but stare in awe, stare an artist to her craft and caress it in my mind like the lightest touch drawn across the cheek of a lover.

i fear starting again, facing blankness on the page. i feel it's like an empty club; none of the hip, cool phrases are going to want to waltz in there unless there are at least a few other words to keep them company. writing, as i've always said, is a fickle, fickle thing.

i take a long break and sip at my coffee again. i write alot about coffee, perhaps because it's by my side in these cool and soothing mornings. the world is coming into focus slowly. i've been up for 2 hours at least. the sky is trading in the new born white for a faint blue, the grass is green, green, under the one big star, the air is slow and thick in it's chill having laid in the slopes of the night. a hapuu fern pushes up against this window, green leafy bits flattened against this plane like an anxious child waiting to go outside. but this backwards, a plant that wants to come inside? what could it possibly want to do in here? this cold box with it's 5 walls? but then i realize it's not begging to come in, it's not even trying to push this obstruction out of its way, rather it's growning with this window. adaptability juxtaposed with rigidity, life and death, movement and the fixed. the fern will push up and up and maybe, if given the time, it could cap this house, grow over it, a green hill in the landscape, a trellis of human invention.

how must one live? how should one live? there are many books to tell you and even more talking heads to assure you that they have discovered the recipe for living, proper living that is. but i think, and this is just my humble opinion, that the guides for good living are all around us. look at the trees and rocks and mountains and ocean. look at the rivers and lakes. look at the fish and the algae, look at the birds and the bugs, look at the animals, look at the sun and the stars and the moon. look at the soil, look in the soil. it's all there. all that we want to know, it's all under our feet, it's all around us, it's above and below.

granted the world is a different place. we have more complex enemies, we have man-made diseases and bombs, we have hate and greed. yet, yet...i look at the fern outside my window, a fern like a person, growing as best it can against an immovable object. i look at this fern pushed up against this glass, living, living within a molecule from the edge of this rigid, lifeless entity, living, living with its lot. i look at this fern and i think, what if all that seperated us from our true selves, from that "good life", from the nature of what we are, was simply, a plane of glass? what if we have been looking out the windows of our own fabricated worlds thinking the entire time that there was no seperation, that we were living as we were meant? there are so many illusions that make me think i'm outside, when i'm really inside, make me think i'm interacting when there's really sound proof glass all around me. but this fern, this fern has managed to talk some sense into me. break the glass it says, break the glass and come out of hiding. i see my body plunging into the glass, there are blood drops like dew all over me. i'm curled up next to the fern, blood sinks into soil. i give it happily, happily to save my life.