They Bloom, Then They Fall

I feel sad every time it happens and start to think "something's wrong." But J. says, "They bloom, then they fall." I dunno. Ella is looking a little bare now.

Little Man, the rubber tree, is now Little Men, which is sort of creepy as a name, so we'll have to come up with something different for the group:

They are much happier now, as a family. Spawning is good. Room to grow is good. But I admit that I was little help in the process. J. spread out a garbage bag in the middle of the room and went to work. I stood there, watching, holding up a branch here and there and refilling the water pitcher while he moved dirt around in bare handfuls. I somehow just couldn't "dig in" to this dirt-scooping effort in the middle of a Bronx living room, the incongruity was a kind of short-circuiting overload for me. We cultivate green growing things here in the asphalt jungle; we read Don Delillo on the porch in the country.

There is a kind of psychic discontent at the root of this behavior, I sense this; I note it not so much as a self-condemnation, because what's the point of that, but more as an observation about two-ness. About what it means and looks like to live in a state of straddle and tension, to seek that state and to devote much of one's life energy to holding that tension, to keeping the extremes alive and dynamic in a single experience, to exploring and cultivating the ways in which the far ends of a spectrum nurture and deepen one another. City and country, yes; and everything else, so much more...