Reacting to Poetry sample, "The Man on the Dump"

The Man on the Dump

September 15, 2011

Invisible Priest

I walk in the daytime to escape. To escape my racing mind, to escape the expectations, the desires, the judgments, the uncontrollable circumstances, which replay in my head like a rollercoaster ride that has no end. On this particular day it is raining, each drop a bit more torturous than the last. I begin to wonder if other people feel this way. Am I alone in my suffering? Am I alone in the way I feel trapped in my thoughts, unable to catch my balance from this rollercoaster seat?

I continue walking. I lift my head to see a beautiful girl. She is crying. I think about how I want to cry. I don’t have time to cry. There are too many things to worry about, too many people to please. I wonder what is making the beautiful girl cry. She is able to cry. I am not able to cry.

My feet begin to move faster and the wind of my mind begins to pick up. I swiftly pass children obnoxiously laughing in their yards. It would be so nice to be a child again. To be carefree enough that laughter bellows from the deep of the belly. I am not laughing, I realize tomorrow is trash day. The cackling kids are sorting a weeks worth of family trash into 3 containers. Trash headed to the dump, plastic and glass recyclables and paper recycles. I cannot help but scowl. My trash has not been picked up in three weeks for this very reason. I do not have time to sort through my garbage.

I open the door into my dark house and am hit with a putrid smell that again reminds me tomorrow is trash day. George is laying in the corner drool dripping from his jowls. He looks at me and looks at the trash. Although he is a dog, I can feel that he wants me to do away with the rubbish. George is a dog and even he cannot stand to live in this dump. I breathe in deeply and release a long, drawn out sigh. I begin to sort the trash. Plastics in blue, paper in green everything else in the tall black pail.

By the time I am done I notice my thoughts are moving slower. My body is relaxed and I do not feel the clutter of accumulated trash in the kitchen.

One by one, I bring each bucket to the curb. When I am done I sit underneath a tree I had never noticed before. I look up and down the street at each neighbor’s trash tidily aligned. At closer glance I see that numerous houses have brown buckets with the words ‘Natural Material’ jotted on the side. My attention is brought to the scuffling of feet to my right. I turn to see a girl walking down the driveway of the apartment complex next door. She is carrying a brown bucket. “Hey,” I yell, “I have a question!” The girl looks over at me and then behind her. “Yes, you! I have a question!” I walk towards her and immediately realize it is the crying girl from earlier. I pay no regards to the incident and ask her about the brown bucket she is holding. “It is food scraps”, she says. She continues to tell me food scraps and other biodegradable materials are picked up every week by a local farm. They mix together these materials with wood chips, leaves, grass clippings and water to eventually create compost. Compost is then added to food-producing soils as nutrient-rich fertilizer. “You know,” she says, “it’s not a new technology. Food has always been recycled in similar fashion. Just as leaves fall from a tree, becoming a layer of nourishing mulch.” I thank her and briskly walk away.

It is nighttime and I walk past my house, to no particular place with no particular intention. I am thinking. Thinking about “compost”. Intrigued by the recycling of energy that has happened since the beginning of life on Earth. I see the moon rise in the empty sky. I am walking and I stop. I lift my head, and as luck would have it I am looking through a chain-linked fence into the city dump.

There is a man sitting atop a mountain of garbage. The man on the dump. I cannot believe this man. He is fenced in, trapped atop a pile of trash. My mind fires judgments and I am appalled by that disgust and this. I begin to walk away, the usual scowl returning to my face. Unexpectedly, I hear the impulsive beating of a drum. It sounds like a heartbeat, feels like a vital current. It vibrates my soul.

I fall to my knees and I know who it is coming from. Cries turn into sobs. I am wailing, my heart is pounding in rhythm with the man’s drumming. In this moment I realize now, that image of a man is me. I am the prisoner to the mountain of garbage in my mind. The man on the dump is as free as the nightingale who tortures the ear of those like me. He is beating for that which he believes, he is at peace with that which he believes, he is close to that which he believes. His mind is free, his faith expressed openly, his beliefs bigger than he. My body is trembling as I sob.

And then, I am silent.

I close my eyes and am lost in the feeling of aliveness circulating my body. My ears beautifully hum the echo of soul vibration. Experiencing a rush akin to the unexpected ending of a rollercoaster ride. I become lost in the the.

I open my eyes to the beautiful girl standing before me. She is holding a bouquet of azaleas, trilliums, myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox… The colors are amazingly vibrant and my eyes are open for what feels like the first time in many years. My head is weightless and I feel the purifying change. “I see you have been crying,” the girl says softly, “is it because you have learned to sort the trash?”

Without words I sit up and begin to walk. It is daytime and I am walking. The wind tickles my arm and I begin to laugh. I see the compost, paper, plastics, glass and rubbish lining the streets. I laugh boisterously now, each bellow shedding years of stagnant emotions once blanketing my soul.

As I continue on, I am elated. How funny it is that the greatest lesson of my adult life has been learning to sort and take out the trash. Plastics, glass and paper recycled to another generation of usable material, food scraps broken down into next year’s vegetable harvest. The thoughts that accumulate in my mind and suppress me are no different. To understand and love expression of emotion. To take the energy of the mind and allow it to flow away freely in a current of tears or laughter. That is sorting through the garbage. To hear the mind but know when to stop listening. Some trash can be recycled, while garbage cannot. These are the thoughts we cannot change but must learn to live with and openly express. These are the thoughts we must learn to keep under control, these thoughts in excess are unsustainable.

I am smiling as I walk, and I must have gone in a circle because the beautiful girl is there again. She is there with her azaleas (and so on), crying freely like a child. I surprise myself and wrap my arms around her tightly. “Why do you cry beautiful girl?” I want to know. She points to the moon, which hangs in the daytime sky. And in that moment I knew. She cried that way not from sadness but out of pure feeling, pure connection with her divine nature, with that which she believes. We stood there harmoniously for hours that passed as minutes. In these moments I am a child. Gently, her soft voice breaks the silence. “For that is where I first heard of the truth. The the.”