Having Enough

When I open my eyes to the gray light peeping around the borders of the curtains and drop my hand to scratch the stubby little ears of my dog, I do not trouble myself with thoughts of the world or its viruses or those who scramble after its thrones or its frocked masters who speak for God or its oil reserves or its intentionally-stoked fires of unrest. These things may come to affect me someday, but in order to do so they will have to make their way to this small acreage. If they do this, they may well learn why the gate to my life is locked and guarded.

In the silver hush of zero-six-fifteen, I can hear at least a score of different birds passing comment on my passage among them, and I can smell the flowers and the pine sap and the honeysuckle, and I am untroubled by the posturing of those who would kill my quiet hours if they could.

I don’t know my own heart, so how can I know the Pope’s? I don’t know how much money is folded into my wallet at this hour, so why would I trouble my own soul with thoughts of cybercurrency or futures or bonds? Why would I be interested in interest, since my people have long at least pretended to abhor usury and it’s hard, bitter berries?

What draws my mind’s gaze is the corner bracing of a fence, the tight, dry course of stones in a farm’s wall, the thumping, Jurassic grunts of a bull mounting a cow up in the pasture beyond the tombstones. What aggravates me is the patch of poison ivy pushing up through the soil near the water spigot and the carpenter bee, buzzing with his tunneling and destructive colonization of my rafters and joists.

The well pump is working fine and our water is sweet and soft, and if there are villages on the Dark Continent where glassy-eyed children are famished and dehydrated, I can do no more about it than I can about the bowl of twigs in a tree being raided just at this moment by a crow who will eat every downy and sightless wren chick.

And when I am bouncing in the seat of my little yellow tractor, my mind roams to departed loved ones and to old song lyrics and to arguments, long cooled, arguments with friends long dead — but my thoughts never stray to the topics I’m told should excite and exercise and enrage my emotions. My carbon footprint never amounts to much in my economy, but mourn shortly the unseen and unnumbered insects that lie beneath my heavy footfalls as I trudge across a singing spring meadow.

I am years past being able to deadlift 300 pounds or to do dead-hang pullups, just as I am far beyond fretting about what my ancestors — whose statues and monuments have been defaced and pulled down and dragged off to landfills — may or may not have done to various groups who have never contributed anything to this beautiful world except misery and tawdriness and noise. It’s best that such as these never stray onto these acres I watch so closely.

So I spend my Sunday sitting on the porch, cooled by a puff of breeze from the north, the dog sleeping under my chair, my mind calm as a stock tank, unworried about war between two countries whose obliteration would mean nothing to me. I will scrub out the birdbath with a fistful of pine straw, never poring over the glossy pages of a catalog from which I might select a pair of overpriced and faggoty shoes. I will putter in the garden, never once wasting thought nor interior argument about what fruit  my ancient parents might have eaten nor with what wily reptiles they might have consorted.

This morning’s pews were packed with the smug-humble and the perdition-curious, some of them even daring to show a maskless face, but I was not among them. I spoke my own quiet and holy words up into the high and waving leaves, and the dew-draped spiders webs served as my stained glass windows, and was that a cloud of incense or of gnats?

I will not drive 20 miles to ladle food onto trays at a soup kitchen where the cameras stalk and capture, but I will labor next to the woman who loves me as we prepare the carnitas and the tortillas, aware of the bottle of white sangria chilling in the tub of ice on the back porch where we’ve strung Christmas lights, and now we have our own cantina, a pine-bordered watering hole in our own little border town, a green and breathing place where our pure life overlooks the tacky and crime-ridden existence someone wants us to be sunk into and fixated upon.

I have enough. I am watchful and I am content. I enjoy having none of the answers, and I enjoy not being looked to for answers. The bones of bloodthirsty red Indians and of restless, innovative Europeans rest beneath the ground on which I walk and garden. The holy parade of days outlasted them, and it will outlast me. Praise be.

~ S.K. Orr