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Writer's pictureSebastien Clermont

The Gardener

Updated: Dec 1, 2021

What happens when you notice something unfathomably wrong growing from a good source, like a fruit of death upon the tree of life?


Do you pluck the fruit, taste it, try to understand it?


Or do you let it fall and rot, with the wisdom to let the natural cycle flush out this aberration?

You, child, are incapable of such patience. You want to taste everything.


The consequences of sticking your tongue in nature’s wheel are many.


To interfere with a greater intelligence’s process of sublimation is to allow the impurity to fester.


Like a Pagan god, it can only grow as powerful as the level of devotion its worshippers offer it.


This is how you create your own demons.


The inner quietude that lets us see the subtlety of nature in all its intensity,

the pure joy of being alive instead of dead,

these are only bearable for a moment.


It’s never too long before you run back to entropy's welcoming arms,

like a bug drowning in a carnivorous plant’s nectar.

So here you are in the garden with dangerous flora and rotting fruits.


Maybe one day you'll learn to let your inner compost grow new life,

gently guiding the process while letting the natural order do its part.


Your psyche then won't be that different from flowers and mushrooms,

they are from the same earth and know how to thrive given the right conditions.


But your psyche is also a snake. It wants to trick and kill and eat its own tail.

And as you run out of metaphors and old alchemical symbols,

trying to turn your shit into gold by writing about it,

the snake laughs silently at your attempt to garden.

Your thumb is not green but febrile now,

in yet another effort to use assortments of verbal symbols to detangle your brain.


You can't see clearly so you chant and yell and perform art in secret.

You exhaust yourself to find some respite from the desire to do something real.

You write about it to assign some meaning to the lost days.


It's easy to self-reflect about failure and turn it into fresh meat for fellow hyenas in a circle-jerk of glorified suffering.


But part of you believes in earnestness, in the radical vulnerability of sharing the ugliest of moments.


You can hold your ecastsy as well as your death-wish,

and let others tell you about both ends of the polarity of their own being,

whatever they may be.

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