Category — you reap what you sow

Blossoms, for all their intricate beauty, are fruitless without pollination. Their purpose is to attract bees, birds, and butterflies to send and receive their magic fairy dust, the secret code that unlocks fruit and seed production. Fertilized or barren, the spent blossoms flutter from their stems after a short and exquisite show; the legacy of the plant relies on fruition.

Only pollen with enough genetic variety to produce healthy offspring will result in reproduction, which is why most plants require cross-pollination. Fruit borne of their own pollen alone would produce weak stock, vulnerable to blight and sterility, so a molecular defense exists to encourage only successful genetic combinations.

At breakfast the other morning, Wendy pointed out a forsythia bush on the edge of the parking lot. It was covered in half-open blossoms, spent before they could unfurl. I wept for it later, the poor sweet thing, doing its humble best to send fairy dust into the world, expending all that effort and energy desperately pushing flowers into a dormant, barren landscape. Tricked by unseasonably warm temperatures into performing for empty rows of hard metal seats, with nary a honeybee to carry its whisper, and only silence on its carpels.

Nature, for all her exquisite wisdom, delivers such cruelly objective consequences for her creatures’ timing errors. When the blooms open at just the right time, a pollinator that favors that plant and its best genetic crosses will visit just long enough to dance the timeless waltz of creation on its petals, leaving dreams and carrying wishes away on their furry legs and antennae.

The promise of fruit is made that very moment; if the plant is given enough sunshine, water and fresh air but is left otherwise undisturbed, the next generation will push forth from the stems, sent from deep within the all roots and veins, cell by cell, to make new life in the soil below.

The forsythia will most surely find itself frostbitten, frozen over, flowers encased in a coat of icy shards that will cut them to shreds upon thawing, leaving a pile of rotted mush to seep into its roots, inevitably restarting the cycle of life, birth and hope under the ground. Another chance to get it right.

My heart ached to impart some comfort, to reassure it that the secret workings of the universe are as impersonal as gravity: when the season and conditions are right the magical becomes the inevitable, the soil is richened for its failed effort, time and wisdom produce fruit sweetened by experience and patience. Gratitude for its timely reminder seeped from the marrow of my stiff and tired hips: buds and berries set on their own time, in their own way, thriving on a lack of human interference in the magic of nature.

It will have learn on its own the difference between January and March, and the futility of blooming at the first signs of warmth instead of having enough faith to wait for spring, that opening is just a start. In its struggle, it will discover that the beauty of its blossoms are just a vessel for its essence, which lays in wait for that familiar ancient whisper to awaken it to fruition.

I smiled as I wiped the tears from my cheeks, though, because I know the joy of mastering those lessons: an entire existence dripping with life and sustenance from every stem and branch, with roots enough to anchor and nourish, and wishes given flight on the wings of bees.

I stood in the middle of the bar and took a long sip from my drink, letting the vodka slip down my throat and start a slow, low fire throughout my stress-ravaged body. Just as I felt a month’s worth of tension start to slip out of my toes and fingertips, the General Manager of my sector at the Borg approached.

Are you okay? I know this was a hard day for you, do you want to talk a little? I’d like to know how you’re doing.

We had just executed a mass-layoff in my office, including most of my staff, and my knowledge of this impending doom preceded theirs by a little over a month. I had cried at the prep meeting, while terminating my Payables clerk, and with some coworkers after they were handed their pink slips. I cried all damn day, and only worried a little about my professional reputation.

I’m okay. I meant what I said earlier- this is the right thing for the business, it’s the right thing for those of us who remain- but that doesn’t make it any easier. I know that I’ve been able to look back on my darkest days six weeks, six months, six years down the road and I’ve had the solace of realizing that if I hadn’t faced that hardship, I wouldn’t be right here, and that’s always been a source of comfort to me. To be able to say of the hardest things that they helped make the best things in my life. I’m sad tonight for the people we let go, but more than anything, I just hope that they can look back later on and see that this ending was the beginning of something better.

A relieved smile spread from his eyes to his cheeks, and we chatted for a few minutes before someone cut in and I excused myself.

A few days shy of my thirty-second birthday, I still believe that. I can’t defend it, I can barely explain it, the best hope I have is to point to nature and say it is evidence to me of a higher order that we have not yet grasped in our knowledge of the universe.

If faith is an innate knowing, then this is mine, and I understand it in my bones.

I don’t know why bad things happen to good people, and I don’t know why some lives end so early or so unexpectedly. I understand that people hurt people because they hurt, but I don’t understand the cosmic value in so much pain. Perhaps there isn’t any at all, and I only seek to ascribe it some value to make peace with it somehow.

Since my earliest years of awareness, I’ve been called an old soul. Certainly, I’ve had a few encounters with strangers that were more recognition than introduction, and have always read between the lines without really realizing it. What that means is beyond any of us to understand, and I won’t do it the injustice of pinning it down. Those kinds of things are still magical to those of us that want to see them, and I suppose my biggest question for my coincidence and science friends is, simply:

Why wouldn’t you want to think that things happen for a reason, even if we don’t understand how or why?

I’m incredibly suspicious of anyone who doesn’t believe in something, one thing, anything that they can’t see.

Last night, I sat in the kitchen nook. The steam from my soup kissed my cheeks, and the faint smell of woodsmoke sat in the back of my throat. My thoughts drifted to my upcoming birthday and the annual reconciling of reality against my visions and dreams.

As always, my life looks nothing like what I ever imagined for myself. The people and experiences that filled the gap between my dreams and my defeats are both precious and priceless in their own right, and I choose to believe that they put me right here, right now, with this particular perspective. Any variation on my history would not have produced this moment, with these people, and my capacity to appreciate them.

You can argue with that all you want to, and I would relish the discussion.

What you can’t argue with is the sense of recognition and belonging that strikes deep and true, past my neurotic brain and my poor schizophrenic heart, straight into the marrow. It produces a warm calmness that whispers above all the noise of doubt and fear.

You belong here.