said I'm gonna buy this place

and burn it down


I have been fascinated for a long time by the religious (for lack of a more fitting term) concept of the Year of Jubilee. I had heard a few sermons touch on it, mention it in some detail, probably slept through a very thorough discourse on it once. My understanding of it is very simple, and possibly wildly wrong: once in a while, at the appointed time, all the clocks are set to zero. We all start over. Maybe not in the grand sense of Starting Over. As I understand it the Hebrew translation of this idea involves property and the Christian-type involves people, feelings. Debts are forgiven. Universal pardon. My favorite is 'families shall recover their lost or absent members.'

I am all for this idea. I support the idea of once in a while, not all the time cause what? But now and then, in our own hearts and our own lives, we do this. Return what is not ours, even if it seems like it is ours now. Forgive trespasses, whether or not forgiveness has been requested. Recover that which we have lost. And let it happen in our lives and the lives of those around us, those people that we love, and those people that may be absent. My life, man, my life gets fucked up. I fuck it up a lot and sometimes I'm just standing there but some times I'm the last one to know and by then I am lounging in a situation that is so complicated and so intricate and so fucking stupid that I don't know how I'll ever get out. So I basically run away. Less running and more, I don't know, shifting. Shifting away from the things that are falling apart and moving toward something I can see, I can figure out, even if it is an empty fridge in the middle of the desert. I know what that is; it's an empty fridge. In the middle of the desert. Sure beats what-all that was happening back home. But then, once I have had time to process the thing or event or personality crisis, I am living in an entirely different universe. I would love to be able to wait out the requisite time period and then call Jubilee! Ally ally in free! Don't ask me anything, just accept and recover and forgive. This, of course, is the lazy, coward's way out. It is also the harried, confused's way out.

The idea of the Year of Jubilee also refers to the periodic lying fallow of the land. This is an agricultural marvel; nothing grows in this dirt. Leave it alone for a year and plant it again. This appeals to me almost as much as the rest of the idea. Sometimes, you know, you just can't grow anything there anymore. I know when that time has come. I move a lot. A lot. I chew through homes and towns and people and I do not even care. It's necessity! It's my upbringing! It's now a decision that I make because I am all grown up and I'm the law. I have stopped physically moving so much. It's a step. What I was working on was the rest of it; building relationships and drawing circles with the intent to keep them. I have done very well. Planted the seeds. Crops have flourished. Sometimes I didn't even have to do any of the work, it's like I bought the property and there was this fabulous garden. With rocks. Some rocks. A rock. I could move it out, you know. Load it up and shove it off a cliff in to the river. Don't think I haven't thought about it. Rocks don't breed, you know? It's just one. I could leave it there and work around it. I could sell the back twenty acres and let someone else deal with it. But you know what sounds best to me? Laying fallow. Letting this plot go for now, returning when I am ready and the soil is ready and I think that I can grow a single thing in it that doesn't runt or dull or break my back. I could come back to it, to my own heart, to my own brain, when I am ready. By then it will have been untended and I'm sure there will be plenty of rocks, but then maybe that one won't seem so important.

Or maybe, in the year or so that I'm away from myself, I will discover a talent for well witching. And then I could sell off my equipment and fuck that fucking stake, I do not need it at all. It's a lot of fucking work, farming. Especially when you wake up and your entire plot has broken off and fallen into a crevasse that you did not even know was there. Burn the land, salt the earth. Find the life you were meant to have.