Bury the good ones.

I’m sat at the kitchen table after having disemboweled my desk drawers, dust bunnies, crumpled receipts from 3-5 years ago, old diaries, drawings, notes, exhibition releases, half used sketchbooks, bulging envelopes containing sewing pattern pieces, scraps of fabric, a print out of a birds nest with gawping chicks, usb cables, part of an embroidery hoop, a now void uncashed check(!), unsent letters, an empty box of oil pastels are strewn over the living room floor while Nick is out playing tennis.

I’m tired of myself and my unfinished projects, my half fleshed out ambitions, ideas that brew in my head, dissipating under the pressure of questions I can’t come up with an answer to. How are you going to make money this year? Where are you going? Will you stay in America? Are you going to have kids? What do you believe in? How are you going to survive the next 10, 20, 30 years? What’s your plan? What’s your plan? What’s your plan?

There is no plan. There aren’t fixed answers, life washes over me, collecting in the corners of the skewed skirting boards and peeling linoleum of my rented time slot on Earth.

In the studio, a month or so back, Ako was talking about belonging. Her words are scrambled in the fog of my memory, but the sentiment was something like… There is an always returning realisation that we belong. Each of us belongs to this world, we don’t need to achieve a status to belong, we just do. We belong to each other, to the plants, animals, mountains, rivers, soil. Knowing that and feeling it are two different things. Acting as if you belong is another. Belonging, not as entitlement, but responsibility.

Walking along the old trodden dirt of the Gabrielino trail that winds around the Arroyo Seco last weekend, I watched the fluffed up mountain squirrels, more peppery than the gingerbread coated ones perched in the bare-twigged black walnuts up Debs Park the weekend before, bigger than the white bellied squirrels of London my two year old nephew had pointed out in the soggy brush on the common the week before that.

I think I relate to the squirrels, my plans are squirrel plans. I make and write and organise with feverish instinct. I must bury these nuts. I must, I must. The nuts must be buried. This acorn is a good one, fat and golden and round. I’ll enjoy this one later. Dig it in the dry clay, the damp mulch, the gap under this root. That’ll do me when the time comes. But then, I come out of the trance, I have forgotten what I was doing, I’m hungry, where are my nuts?

Do you think if we could tell the squirrels they were responsible for planting the vast stretching shadowy oaks above, who give forth in abundance hundreds of thousands of perfect green-gold nuggets, sustaining the life work of squirrels for generations to come… do you think we’d find the squirrels belly up in ecstatic paralysis? Or would the thought glimmer in a black bead eye for just a moment before the scrabbling continued, because tomorrow is another day, and this fat one is a good one and must be buried deep in a nice cool hole.