Writing Water: For Amarah at Twenty-Seven…
Writing Water: For Amarah at Twenty-Seven ... With Mom, Dad, sister Ella, partner Ollo, and close friends Ramona and Clark ... in the Tides ... Twenty-seven years young ... when water begins to verb itself through your life ... Amarah ... you wake in the house ... reading thirst in leaves like imagining what stars are like close up ... The office monstera knows you're coming ... leaves turn toward the door ... You have created tides in buildings ... Lilies rises and falls on your schedule ... high tide when you arrive ... low tide weekends when those buildings hold their breath ... Someone texts you: The jade is looking philosophical again ... They understand ... how plants think in time while we think in breaks ... How your care creates micro-climates in corporate deserts ... Saturday night ... You, Ollo, Ramona, Clark ... move like water ... The Club dance floor remembered your past footprints ... Ramona dances like evaporation ... rising ... dispersing ... reforming ... Clark moves like groundwater ... deep ... steady ... inevitable ... Ollo is all tributary ... joining ... diverging ... joining again ... You Amarah are the tide ... pulling them all into rhythm ... The bass frequencies travel through your water ... the 60% of you that's ocean ... lake ... pond ... big river ... brook ... through the 70% of your mind that's a brand new kind of aquarium ... We're houseplants with mind anxiety ... Clark said once ... three of you sweating chlorophyll ... photosynthesizing under strobe lights ... You showed us how to press flowers in resin ... make earrings that hold sunshine ... She wears interesting accessories during when dancing ... shiney shells swinging from both ears ... Ollo's jacket has a moss collar ... you helped them seal it properly ... They become forest floor at The Club one Friday ... everyone wants to understand how water moves over rocks and soil embodiment ... Clark wore a crown of air plants ... silver Vancouver good thoughts growing outside their head ... Bartender said: What is that? ... Clark said: An external system ... Thaey all laughed like when water breaks over stones ... Your mum taught you: eucalyptus in the shower becomes courage ... lavender in your pillowcase becomes lovelier dreams ... burnt sage in a pocket becomes protection that smells like home ... Four housemates and you are a water cycle ... One doesn't understand why you all don't name every plant ... doesn't know that Fray the palm banzai is teaching patience ... Shower steam feeds bathroom fern ... Breathing becomes window condensation ...
Your misting becomes everyone's better air ... The utility bill is sacred text ... You all read it together at the end of every monthly ... We used too much this and that ... Move on to tidal patterns in corporate buildings ... You mapped it ... The 43th floor executives water their own plants on Mondays ... panic ... The 19th floor waters Wednesdays ... steady ... The lobby waters daily ... You go between floors like swimming through thermal layers in a lake ... Each floor has its own water temperature and humidity ... You adjust ... carry spray bottles like a doctor carries a stethoscope ... You created an indoor rainforest that helps employees think better because the plants are exhaling decisions ... Someone asked: What's the difference between pond mind and ocean mind? ... You answered by showing them water in a bowl ... then water in a tub ... then an online article about Lake Nokomis ... then pointing to the sky which is ocean ... lake ... pond ... big river ... brook ... upside down ... Pond knows every molecule ... Lake knows its shores ... Ocean knows the moon ... At The Club you are ocean ... boundless ... salt-ancient ... At home you are lake ... contained but deep ... At work with the plants you are pond ... intimate with every drop so to speak ... Every Friday ... the gravitational pull starts Thursday at midnight ... You feel it ... It's not just social ... it's cosmic ... The same force that pulls tides pulls you to The Club ... You have unknowingly calculated it ... Your weight creates its own gravity ... enough to bend light ... enough to make Sunday morning feel a lot different than Tuesday morning ... When you wear that necklace to work ... tiny ecosystem close to your heart ... you are saying: I carry my own world ... This is high fashion ... stratospheric ... where clothes become meteorology ... You all moved to the bar ... drank water ceremonially ... like baptismal water running through you ... Every plant you water sends a thank you note to oxygen ... Every dance creates pose with perspiration ... Every inhale and exhale between you and your loved ones generates new stories ... Cosmology isn't above ... it's in the parts of living ... that you subvert with unsung hero misting ... You have created your own economy of care ... fashion of fair trade and living things ... May your roots be moist ... May your evolving leaves know the benefit of sacred light ... You fall up sideways—surrendering to gravity while ascending through rhythm while moving laterally through time ... This impossible geometry that you have mastered without naming it ... Notice what's missing first then become photosynthesis ... Feels the ghosts ... dancers before you creating dents in the fog that guide your movements ... See through your middle eye ... In the strobe's gap ... you all exist between having danced and about to dance again ... braiding the temporal ... You don't just tend plants—you rescue them ... Corporate discards ... Overwatered failures ... Impossible cases ... Like my thirty years of collecting fragments and making art from what others throw away ... you have made a career from rehabilitation ... That bird of paradise everyone said was deceased—you saw it was just speaking a different language ... Now it's seven feet tall ... teaching folks about patience ... You and every person close to you are collective—finding the discarded ... unrecognized treasure ... is not garbage ... It can have another life ... You all live in the gaps ... Space between paychecks ... Pause between songs ... Moment between sleep and waking when someone's shower starts ... Absence of wealth makes you rich in attention ... Absence of space makes you expand into each other's lives like roots ... You fall ... You rise ... You move sideways ... through each other's energy ... You have relocated matter through mattering ... Under Minneapolis ... under The Club ... under corporate towers: fungal networks older than all cities ... Every plant you tend is connected to these networks ... When you water a corporate fern ... a forest feels it ... When you mist a moss ... the Mississippi River knows ... When someone forgets to water something and it survives anyway ... that is the network saying: You better get this instead ... When you dance with plants in your hair ... they are broadcasting to every root system: Joy is possible ... Your mom and grandma is in every leaf ... every successful propagation ... every moment you choose kindness ... The jade cutting you have kept alive is your mom ... Every new leaf is her saying hello ... All of these Amarahs exist simultaneously: Imperfect made beautiful ... Discarded resurrected to be essential ... Fragmented transformed into something harmonious ... Every pour ... every song and dance ... every saved plant is punctuation in the story of your ongoing journey ... Ghost says: This birthday will press into the cosmic arrangement that keeps arranging itself through you ... The water won't stop moving because it is the same as love that can survive every length or distance ... Your mattering matters ... We were and continue to forever be a Mother Earth student ... You are also teaching Mother Earth new dances ... May you always fall up sideways into joy ... Happy Birthday ... Amarah
