Flora and Fauna
I have a forsythia bush in my yard. It’s big enough to park my car in – the last resident of this house saw fit to let the forsythia grow as it would – and grow it did. On two occasions I have taken the clippers to it – hacked and trimmed as high as I could reach. My forsythia bush ended up looking like one of those silly ‘fade’ haircuts from the early 90’s. Then it would grow out again, reassuming it’s shaggy form. I finally decided that my efforts were being wasted, and let the bush do what it would.
A vine possessing equal tenacity grows on my front porch. After several intense clipping sessions, it got my point and started to grow bushy instead of lanky. I basked in my victory – one of my two foes had been vanquished. Then I noticed little plants sticking through my mulch – the damned vine has roots both long and strong, and I now have a dozen baby vines to contend with. If I keep them trimmed, however, they might look like little bonsai bushes next year. My victory became a stalemate. I hung a grape vine off the porch above it, and am now training it to grow up the porch beam and around the wreath. If you can’t beat ‘em…
If I had remembered my Taoism, I would never have wasted the energy on trying to change these plants! The plants have been doing what plants are supposed to do, and have been doing for millennia. They grow. They don’t fight back; they grow around the problem. We’ve all seen plants growing through blacktop. How that fragile stalk pushes through to the sunshine is one of nature’s little miracles. That the soft will overcome the hard is one of the main points of Taoism. How silly of me to forget!
Nature snips at people just as Johannas snip at forsythias. We go to the doctor and they say, “Six more months and it would have been cancer.” Your Mom calls and says, “I have breast cancer.” You have to buy four new tires instead of one cause your damn car has AWD. The person you promoted to senior supervisor at work gets arrested for fencing over $40K in jewelry he received from store employees. Friend’s children are diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Snip, snip, snip.
Tony (mi inamorata) works with people who couldn’t take the snipping. They come from abusive homes filled with alcoholic parents and empty refrigerators. Now they live in seedy apartments, can’t hold jobs, and think the world is out to get them. How do they differ from someone like Oprah, who managed to rise above it all? How come some people break under the pressure and some flourish? Giraffes with short necks don’t make it. Squirrels who can’t climb can’t make it. Perhaps people who cannot handle adversity are not meant to make it? Now that we no longer have to worry about being eaten as prey, is our evolution mental rather than physical?
If you waste too much energy worrying about the inevitable, what are you doing to yourself? If life is stopping you from growing in one direction, grow in another. If you want to be a ballerina but instead you’re a plumber, dance in your living room after work. As Plato would say, know the Form of the dance! (And may I recommend “Plato for Beginners” by Robert Cavalier, the only book that really explained the Forms to me.)
That is our lesson for today, my friends. Be like the plants and adapt. Be like the reed that bends in the wind, not like the mighty oak that falls. It’s pretty simple to do – just accept and let go, over and over and over. Enjoy people and things, but be ready and able to let them go when the time comes.
(One last thing – when you see a speed trap for cars going in the opposite direction, the polite thing to do is warn the other cars by blinking your headlights at them. Kind strangers saved me twice in one day. Share the vehicular love, my brothers and sisters!)
--jerhanner@leftcoastlove.com--