Scarcity and Abundance, a continuation--Letter #52

Abundance—a continuation

Dear Governor Ducey,

The flipside of scarcity is abundance. That’s the point behind these letters. Abundance. More is better. Maybe there’s some nuanced argument one of the letters makes that no one letter could achieve. One thing, at a time, seeded in stuff like garbage and carrots, might hit the right note, at the right time. It’s like poems. The way a poem says, leaf curl, leaves curl, or hunger is an apple, or a blade of grass is a book, or see the elephant’s trunk pull the leg of her dead baby, feel the slice of a broken wine glass in the webbing between thumb and index, hear the tire’s screech, or the squeak of a swing on swingset, or the sound of a man, breathing, breathing, and then not, a sneaker rubbing against a basketball court, cringe a broken fingernail, down to the quick, squint at one hundred lightning strikes, count four hundred thousand cicadas every seventeen years, carry the strange weight of pumice, the strange weight of petrified wood, pretend the log in the river that barely crests his head is a crocodile in Oregon, bury a dog, plant a seed, spy the single grain of sand.

If every day is accounting, you can compress and squeeze, subtract and reduce. If every day is accounting, you can add, list, expand, burgeon, runneth over. To do the latter, you just have to look around. There are seven billion humans. There are a trillion ants. There are elephants. There are grasses. There are tires. It all adds up and if you keep adding, you never have to do more with less because more was already there.