-On the occasion of Community Crafting, November 9, 2017
A year ago, I wrote an essay for the inaugural occasion of what my friend Carlos named “Discomfort Suites,” seasonal salons where artists and writers could get together to eat, drink, and share. I read the essay, “The Garden Path (to Place),” to a warm room of people whose bellies were full with mac n’ cheese and roasted beets and greens and laughter. A November later I find myself revising the essay back in my hometown, preparing to practice some of these actions with a new group of people in East Flatbush. There won’t be mac n’ cheese, unfortunately, but we’ll have cookies and chips. Instead of a home, it will be inside of a library. I still find myself pleading in the same way, begging people to connect in a world that is betting on our mutual disconnection. I still fail a lot. But sometimes it works. Sometimes it feels like it’s working.
In Summer 2016, I went to three weddings of some of my dearest friends. At the one that September, for my friends Paula and Dan, Paula wore a beautiful floral crown and invited people to make their own crowns and boutonnieres at the reception in a yoga studio we had converted for the afternoon in Pilsen, Chicago.
They asked me to deliver the invocation, which I did while wearing a floral crown I had quickly fashioned between gulps of celebratory Modelo. Paula is a museum educator who I became friends when we both worked at the same NYC museum. Dan is a poet who I became friends with because he fell in love with my friend Paula, which isn’t the worst reason to first find yourself in relation to someone. In thinking about their union, I went to the words of Alain Badiou, who in Rhapsody for the Theatre offers love as:
…that scene in which a truth proceeds…it requires work, an ongoing process and a series of operations for allowing difference and disjunction to appear in the form of a couple.
That felt so right, particularly for Paula and Dan, who share an unbridled commitment to discovery and rediscovery and reflection on those practices in a refusal to forget.
That June, I had officiated the ceremony of my friends Corinne and Felix and leaned into Paul’s tried and tested first letter to the Corinthians. We know love is patient and that it is kind, but how many of us get to the part where:
For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And so I stood on the beach with my back to the sea under a canopy of silk flowers, one in my hair for good measure, and shared thoughts on love as a practice of recognition built on the responsibility of holding up a mirror until you are ready to break through it, which Corinne and Felix happen to be expert at.
Over a year ago, I bought a painting from one of my students and it features a man and a woman in a Polaroid torn down the middle, their heads replaced by blooming tropical flowers. When I asked her about it, before she hustled me out of forty dollars, she told me it was about a relationship—a friendship or a romance or a family—that was falling apart.
My father was a florist. He arranged flowers for the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan. Flowers and their accompanying objects have been all over my life, populating the spaces I inhabit for as long as I can remember: shears, floral foam and tape, vases, pedestals, ribbons, wire, little useless vials of water. Whenever I smell roses or lilies I close my eyes and picture myself at seven.
In the original version of this essay, I had created a list as a metaphor to walk people through a garden of truths: some old, some new, some constant. Looking at the list a year later, most of it remains the same, with perhaps a few glaring revisions (guess which) and a couple of additions. Let’s walk...
Read this essay in its entirety at https://leapnoonsun.wordpress.com/2017/11/09/off-the-garden-path/.
