Over the summer while processing and participating in the Black Lives Matter protests and the police and Tr*mp-ian reactions to them, I found in my backyard a vine that had so deeply rooted itself that it had split into several different vines, each the thickness of a baseball bat.

These vines overtook trees that were thriving and had already killed multiple branches off by the time I had realized what was happening. The vine made me consider how things like prejudice and racism invisibly grown in the background of policies rooted in evil and eventually become the institutions themselves.

——

Invasive Species

The genius of the vine

is patience.

Like colonialism,

or the police,

vines pillage silently

then violently.

Invisibly arriving,

sprouting shoots

tracing the earth,

and anchoring

tendrils to trunks.

What might have begun

as a neighborly invitation to dinner

becomes a plundering.

The vine equivalent

of a one-night-stand

that “forgot” to pull out.

Over months

the guest,

overtakes its host

with order and intention.

Mingling

in cedar canopies,

borrowing your car

and returning on E,

leaving you with a pregnancy

you're unable to terminate.

Those same vines that

once elevated

your pretentious trellis,

giving you security and pomp,

are now shaking down

once vibrant organisms,

kneeling on carotids

whispering

“stop talking,

stop yelling,

it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen

to talk.”

Maybe it’s the leaves dropping from the trees and the weather cooling down, or maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been listening to a lot of Buddhist philosophy talks, but I’ve been contemplating my mortality a lot lately and the legacy that I’m going to leave with my children.

I was listening to an interview on the Longform Podcast with Lisa Brennan-Jobs and she recalled a moment from her teenage years where her mom was screaming at a young Lisa in the car while slamming her hands on the dashboard. After reading Lisa’s book, and specifically the passage where Lisa recalled that event, her mom remembered that as she was yelling, crying, and punching the car, thinking that she knew Lisa would remember that moment forever.

At the baby shower for Hank, the namesake for this site, a close friend read the poem below and from then on it has struck me as truly prophetic. We may give our children our love, but not our thoughts. Our actions are our only possessions.

On Children
Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.