Gerald Dillenbeck | + Follow Poet |
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Making Hay

Make hay while the sun shines.

I grew up as a closeted polypathic nature-mystic
on a marginal, at best, family farm
in Michigan.

This farm was my embryonic home,
an extension of my vastly loved and nurturing Mother,
more than my workaholic homophobic Father,
who most emphatically did create a patriarchal god in his own image.
His farm was for slave labor.
Her farm was a garden for growing healthy wealth.

I loved Mom's Multi-ReGenerational Family Farm
like an extension of my ego's mind and body.

And, like a turtle without a shell,
when I first headed off to Ann Arbor's University
I brought my happy and healthy ego with me,
eager to begin my new adventure story,
yet I emotionally stumbled,
felt naked and exposed and depressed,
for lack of my embryonic habitus,
my eco-center,
my home,
my interdependently embracing love of sacred spaces
and their seasons of regeneration and degeneration,
growing still and fading without ego me
conjoining.

I was homesick,
but not for Nurturing Nanny
and Fearsome Father
or even Perfect Princess Sister, whom I cherished,
whom I could talk and listen with as whim might invite,
and, although somewhat more of a sore detachment from our farmhouse interior spaces,
my disorienting alienation from Ann Arbor
was as a too-urban outside place
just as my recreating resident embrace
favored my dorm and classroom youth-learning multicultural race
against more oppressive monoculturing times.

To this day,
despite a six week backpacking hike
along California's Pacific Coast Trail,
plundered by surreal vistas and fragrance and light and unspeakable beauty,
when I imagine a meadow, a field, a woodland,
a pond,
a barn,
an unpaved road,
a gravel drive,
a herd of cattle,
a pen of pigs,
a coop of chickens,
a litter of kittens with eyes still sealed shut,
I recall iconic scenes from this sacred originating home,
my eco-memory
calling my doubly-bound ego-enculturing self
back home
to where we permaculturally began together,
making hay while the sun did shine.

Copyright © Gerald Dillenbeck | Year Posted 2017

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