Plants

Last year was about breaking cycles. I moved twice and realized the burden of the weight I carried with me.
Even now I feel the weight on the shoulders and the weight to come.
Ryan dreamt I sleep walked up a mountain towing a heavy cart. He followed me and when I woke up was unable to ask the question of why I was pulling the cart. Resting the cart down we continued up the mountain, quicker, I would imagine.
The days of unlimited strength are lessening - but nothing has changed, really.

This last year I wrote forty zines and sent them away without making copies to people I had put on a list. A person for everyday in September and October. At the end of it I threw a little party at the theater. Kolby came and even Scott, dizzy, cheerless and gaunt as he was in those days.

More Unity and Universe Blah-ty-blah

"The sycamores have white bark only by the river," Ryan points out.
A jackpot of seeds I find burrowed in a fallen tree, he suggests might have been the hoard of hibernating squirrels. Filled my pockets with cold black wooded balls, slick pods, interesting bark, acorns, walnuts. Brushing them on my pants before slipping them in my pocket.
Home I laid them out on the dinner table and put them in a certain order.  Framing the seeds with the bark. Placing them carefully spaced apart. Donna, biologist, Ph.D, leans over and tells me the names. She tells me some are "pod seeds," the long shiny pod is from a black locust, the chipping bark in from a sycamore, when looks like an rotted old lime is the shell of a walnut, the spiky seed is from a sweet gum, the rough moth wings are from a maple.
"The Kentucky coffee bean pod," she points out.
"A buckeye, or horse chestnut, bark from a birch tree, a sycamore fig."
One by one she introduces me to them.
Two questions spring up for everyone that is answered. The fundamental ones, back to the origins of everything, "how did these come to be?" A question not asked enough, or not explored so thoroughly. It seems there is no questions one can ask that doesn't address the universe itself. 
We are the universe answering the questions of the universe. 

"The universe pondering itself," Max had said (you remember?).

Back to being five-years-old, on the the lap of my cousin Summer who is drawing a face with me. Going over every feature we carefully and deliberately make the shapes. Eyes, squinting ovals, eye lids being a carefully drawn line above. Eye lashes, pupils, the black strips within the color, the soft circle around the color, the pink softness in the corners. We are asking, what makes a nose? What makes a chin?

"The seeds are black because they've been frozen," Donna tells me.
We are unsure about the locket looking pod, maybe a milkweed.

"A milkweed cracks open in the Spring, releasing little floating seeds."

Of the old lime she indicates, "that's a walnut inside its casing. Don't try to peel it off or your hands will be dyed black. I had a friend who peeled them for a job one summer and his hands were completely black for a year." The mysteries of the plants revealed from the stories. 

It reminds me of the afternoon with the nettle.