Despite that the natural green growing world is my refuge of spirit and tranquility, it’s a rough mean place—as rough as the ghetto streets. As I wrote in Wild Grace: “The myth of nature’s boundless benevolence can be shattered in three words: things eat you.” They also bite, sting or poison you, shoot you with acrid skunk juice, and (if you’re not careful) make your shoe soles smell like the local wildlife’s fecal remnants. Given that we’re a part of nature still, it’s no surprise that harsh defensive tactics translate to city streets and pacifist’s gardens.

Still, I never expected to be flipped off by a bunch of flowers.

I find myself wondering: is this the floral equivalent of gangsta rap? Surely neither nature nor gardener intended their beautiful blooms to remind anyone of rude and violent music. But everything is interconnected—that’s the familiar spiritual truth. There are few degrees of separation between this meditative arrangement and N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton. There’s no true separation at all.

Personally, I’m at peace with that. I was never a fan of Niggaz With Attitude, given their misogyny and advocacy of violent mayhem—I preferred Public Enemy’s wildly creative and conscious raps—but I understood where N.W.A.’s attitude came from. My little high school trips into Compton for basketball and football playoffs were enough to convince me that living there could’ve made me violent too. As warped as it may be, violence is a defensive tactic in a harsh climate—a tragic survival adaptation. Alas, it’s still nature’s brutal way. So I get why N.W.A. shunned the “gangsta rap” label and insisted they made “reality rap,” because for them, it was reality.

That claim could easily lead me into another rap, about how much we create our own reality. (That’s a useful attitude, but incomplete in its truth. Ask genocide refugees in Rwandan camps if it’s only their viewpoint holding them back.) But I’d rather look at flowers than rap. This day, I thought about how this bunch of blooms—like N.W.A.—stood there blindly flipping off every passer-by, regardless of whether they deserved it. I wondered what insects might be brutally eating each other on and underneath the flowers, below my threshold of notice. I turned and left the Flowaz With Attitude to work on their new CD, Straight Outta Compost. It too will sell millions, if authorities say it shouldn’t.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2010 at 10:54 am and is filed under Grace and Tranquility, Part of the Wind, Wild Grace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.