Dharma
Sometimes I feel melted into my Avon scenery. I walk past my neighbors' homes and touch the spider web shrouds in the ice plant, I watch the sun cast start light upon the rusting Radio Flyer sled artfully placed against the crumbling slats of a blue house. We don't get snow in Souther California. We don't even get rain. Yet another house, the two-story rustic wood home with a shake roof, offers visitors six old-fashioned paisley umbrellas in a Grecian urn on the front stoop. Until Avon, I never knew rabbits nested in a plum hedge, just three yards from two German Shepherds and the constant drone of a television set.
These mysterious strangers with sleds and umbrellas and secret bunnies wouldn't be real without me, I think. The row of ant sand dunes shifting across the red brick wall would disappear. No one would see the hummingbird tumbling through a knee-high lavender forest. No one would touch the tilted grate beneath the curb, or see the forgotten gnome under the overgrown lime tree. Fifty houses on six small streets, like fifty islands, separated by moats of black walkway and SUVs, and no one to notice them but me.
I never walked these streets in the past. I always drove through them, saw everything from the waist up, glancing from my driver's seat, from the side of my head not connected to a cell phone, from the small part of my mind not occupied with bills and schedules and anxieties over my children. Avon forces me to do things I don't like to do, forces me to knock on these doors. I never know what to say. I'm comfortable with that waist-up view. I liked the breeze in my hair, my sister's voice over the phone, boys reading comics in the back seat of my van. This is too personal. I know more about my neighbors than they know about me. I know one of them drinks too much Bass Ale. Another reads three papers a day. I feel an invisible connection to them, as if walking past their homes, their garbage on trash day, their cars and grass and pets, makes them real, makes me real, makes us all real, special, somehow the same person, or mirror images, or holograms of each other. I'm trying to put words to feelings that come from that place just outside my body, from the other side of the sun.
I think about our bodies, whose cells work with precision under the direction of both our brains and our encoded data. Becoming ill is not a random event; it is a reaction to a series of decisions we have made about coming in contact with other potentially sick human beings, about non-nutritive food choices, about negative mental states. We mistreat our body, and our body gets our attention with an all-out attack on our senses, a deliberate action. Our bodies react to stimulus, they don't act on a whim. And our bodies are a reflection of our world, made of the same material, formed from the vapor and the dirt, every cell in our system responds to the call of the wild. The call of my walks. The call of my Avon.
Walking on the beach at night, I feel the wet graininess underneath me, and for a moment the cool brown sand, the water, and my feet are one. The water and sand travel up my legs, chilling my thighs, ocean brine sloshing inside the cavity of my body, till I am reborn a mermaid. Images float through my mind, watery pictures of sea plankton and silt, and at once I comprehend that my mind is the mind of a dolphin, a mermaid, a whale, a seashell, a grain of sand. I am part of everything I touch or see or wonder about. My cells speak to their cells, we sing together. We keep each other breathing, keep the waves rolling, the dolphin leaping. Somewhere in the Caribbean a conch shell has fantastic dreams of my particle board desk and aging computer, feels my hopes and dreams; we share our earthly existence. A child yells to her parents in the distance and my scales and fins change back into sand-worn flesh.
We could all be so real. So real.
12:43:18 PM 
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