White everywhere and divided into three-dimensional spaces, defined by length, width, and height. People and things belonged inside, the demarcations appropriate to their certain essences. My box was where I was permitted to think and feel; I was to simply be what I was—that— no more, no less.
Exiting my box and peering to the right I was given a view of my next box neighbor. A stately Negress, she stood tall, inspecting a mirrored wall up and down, verifying that she was prepared to reflect a positive image. Her coloration eluded me as immaterial. It was her regal erect posture that put me in mind of an African queen. She slipped out of her own box and went her way toward whatever destination.
Outside our boxes a complex manifold offered many choices of exit strategy. Most interesting was a double sized aperture that accommodated a spread of garden soil. In its center sprouted a single aloe plant that propagated only a bifurcation of scrawny green branches. They were not spectacular in their will to survive. I felt sympathy for the puny planting and slipped by, determined not to add shame to the anguish of the paltry growth, which was doing the best it could. After a time of being off doing something or other, I returned. My neighbor was entertaining company and had enlivened her drab costume with a fork of bright Kelly green trousers. It was a chic habiliment.
That enhancement played many-fold as I passed by again and again and yet again. Indeed, the most recent sortie from my personal rectangle, and past hers, displayed a veritable, as well as virtual, chorus line of dancers, garbed in kaleidoscopic green and black and white. They moved in sync, matching time, demonstrating how folk might cooperate and have fun doing it. Their high kicks and fancy foot work projected an exhilaration that rubbed off onto me as I passed the aperture of their domain. I smiled in spite of myself and moved on, my step quickening along with the thunder of happy feet—theirs and mine.
Upon revisiting the aloe plant, it had become a different expression of herbage. Where previously there had been two branches, now there were eight, angular displacements equally divided, their octagonally spaced arches conquering the garden space entire, mimicking a grand herbaceous arachnid. Noting what it had accomplished made me happy for a plant that had become sovereign of its garden, its purpose to provide healing to any and all passersby. What must the plant feel, as a visitor breaks off a portion of aloe persona and tucks it away to use against some future pain of rash or abrasion? That’s what people do to aloe plants. Given the contract evolved between plant life and animal life, aloe must surely rejoice in having fulfilled its duty to assuage the pain of its opposite kingdom. If it had a chest, it would take a deep lung inflating breath and be proud. Perhaps it simply activates its chlorophyll to transform an extra measure of sunlight. Everything has a way to feel proud and happy.
Other than the aloe plant and the Kelly dancers, I had no sense of what was happening in any of the other spaces, except to know that they were enlivened with purpose-filled entities, every bit as real as my own. It seemed odd that we could so closely co-exist but not have any real understanding of others’ lives. While they were making the best of their time in the place of white boxes, I had no sense of any creative achievement in mine. Perhaps I will visit this place again, and do better next time. This dream-time reverie smacks suspiciously of Zoom. Could it be so?
morethanenoughtruth 