In Order To Find Abundance?

I am making a mess. Yellow plum juice squirts through my fingers and the pits shoot upward and land God-knows-where. Plum slime slides down my kitchen window and across the table. Thick stringy yellow splotches adhere to the "clean" dish rack, the bench and the floor. It looks as though an Irish Wolfhound has projectile vomited in my kitchen.

I am initially appalled at the mess. I had thought this would be "the fun part" of canning today. Now, I look around me and my nose wrinkles. I feel every muscle in my chest contract as I resist the chaostrophy I have created. I have to wonder.

In the backyard, Trinidad is digging a hole. He plans to make it big enough to trap some innocent adult who wanders past. He is covered with dirt to the extent that he appears to be some nationality that he is not. I ask him to sit somewhere other than the couch.

Why is Trinidad's mess liberating, a clearinghouse of structure and order in the name of raw creation? Why does he embrace this expansiveness effortlessly while I cringe to fling pulp in what was a tidy kitchen? Where has my youth gone?

An intimate once told me that he seriously questioned whether abundance was the order of the universe. Our relationship ended much sooner than I'd anticipated, and now I wonder if he's right. There is a certain chaos in abundance -- a running over, perhaps even a lack of awareness. In this moment, I can imagine abundance, remember the feeling of fingerpaint running down the insides of my sleeves in kindergarten, recall sensations in my body back in the day when it did not bear the responsibility of Clean Up Time.

Yep. The feeling's still alive. But now, I am in ebb, quietly stockpiling my energy to prepare dinner and organize the lives and household of a family of 4 or 5 (depending on who's counting themselves aboard at any given point). I turn the tide inward in the face of this mess, drawing it toward me in an effort to localize the chaos so that I do not have to stretch much to stow all in its place before bedtime.

I wonder if the Willow tree does this, too. I wonder if right now, as that majestic tree appears to grow effortlessly in abundance, it actually holds its water carefully, turning silvery leaves away from the sun. I wonder if the wide expanse of its limbs bear introspective cells that order its efforts by design, an invisible and soundless ebb that necessarily keeps the tree rooted in its skyward thrust.

Perhaps abundance is only a portion of the equation. Saying "half" seems too divisive, as if the word could be separated from its opposing force. Perhaps that force is not scarcity, but conservation -- care and awareness of the current life cycle we are offered, the totality of abundance and conservation equaling an ultimate sustainability.

In that view, scarcity is not related to abundance at all. It is a falling out of trust in presence and sustainability over the long-haul, the acrobatics of an ego self-entranced.

Hmmm. Just see what busy minds can create out of a mess....