Jamison Square in Portland’s Pearl District has two distinct faces. One half of the park embraces an interactive waterfall. Trees and grass border flagstones all around the fountain, which changes from delicate rills to thundering cascades according to an internal timer. This half of the park is always a happy social scene, packed with visitors playing, wading, sun tanning, and picnicking. In contrast, the other half of the park looks oddly unfinished, as if its planners had run out of money mid-project. No one ventures into this arid plain covered with unfriendly gravel except dogwalkers, who leave it as soon as their pets deposit soon to desiccate little turds. Thus, Jamison Square is either beautiful or hideous depending on your focus.
Sitting with your legs dangling in plashing water, children squealing nearby, you think, “Life can’t get any better than this.” Evaporating droplets cool your skin and make patterns on the grey flagstones. Someone strums a guitar, someone else tugs on a dancing kite, and you reflect how lucky you are to live in a cosmopolitan town with such hip venues free for the enjoying.
Turn the other way, and you think, “Who’s responsible for this horror?” The fierce light reflecting off what appears to be an empty parking lot burns your eyes, and nothing breaks up the colorless plain except scattered piles of dog crap. New lofts surround this dead space, steel and glass desecrations of whatever marsh originally lay underneath.
So it goes for us each moment. Face one direction, and blessings tumble over one another, clamoring for our attention. Face the other, and lack threatens to suck us to the dregs.
Sometimes, all I see is the dry dog turd side of my life: My improvident job with nary a benefit, my shortcomings as a mother, my misanthropy, my limited audience for my creative expression. At others, I am awash in beauty. A neighbor brings me a bouquet of cut flowers from her garden—an explosion of onion flowers, roses, rhodies, and multiform greenery. A student offers me an Eritrean feast—a fiery mouthful of peppers, tomatoes, onions, chicken, and egg on amazing vinegary flat bread. Words tumble out of me onto the page, and I could care less if anyone reads them, so great is the joy of their delivery. One or the other of my children enfolds me in a hug or solicits my opinion.
When the latter happens, the same conditions apply: I did not change my work, find a benefactor to pay for my family’s health insurance, receive a book deal, or get clocked on the head in such a way as to rewire my brain Oliver Sachs fashion. Yet rather than feel beleaguered and impoverished, I feel blessed.
It’s frustrating to spin from one to the other vista like a weather vane—full, empty, lucky, cursed, a pilgrim, a head case. How can I stay facing the fountain, when the dry plain so often sucks me in?
One Saturday, years ago, when we were playing down at the fountain, my young daughter had a lovely idea. She hopped the barrier and began to irrigate the great emptiness on the other side. Soon she had a host of small helpers, digging channels and carrying water in an assortment of bottles, buckets, cups, and caps from the fountain across into the wilderness. One mother tried to get me to make my daughter stop her game, irritated that she couldn’t just lie in the shade and keep her children in sight, but I refused. I said she could forbid her child to help, but I wouldn’t deny my own child this lovely project of bringing water into the wasteland. I wasn’t at all worried she would come to harm. Indeed, soon the children had made a delightful river of mud. The ashy grey landscape began to soften—at least for a little while.
This makes me wonder if I could find a way to irrigate my own wasteland when my mind gets stuck over there. Is there any way I could carry thimblefulls of goodness from the side of excess over to the side of want? Surely there must be some way to introduce blessing to lack.
First the dry stick makes a small channel: “Surely things aren’t as bad as all that.” Then the heel digs it wider, “And what of your good fortune over here?” Then comes the tilted pail, “Isn’t it amazing that you have been given …(a family, meaningful work, faith, an appreciation for beauty, a working body)?” Keep pouring, and the dust will become mud.
The dry plain may never transform into the fountain, but it can become a space capable of revision, capable of sustaining play.
