One little stick is all that I can see. It is in the ground where it was planted many days back. The solitary leaf that was hanging, alerting me to it’s being alive, has long since fallen off. Now it is just a thin brown stick. I pass it every day during my walk and look for signs of life in it. I touch it gently, it doesn’t feel dead. There is something vital, something silent in it still, some force moving through it, sustaining it from within. I wait patiently… water it diligently… urge it to grow…
Many days later, just when I have given up hope, but when the plant itself is ready, a small little green nib of a leaf makes its tentative way through an opening I had never noticed before. Within days, that, which I had thought of as dead, is vibrant and lively again. Nature takes its time. It is the most important lesson I learn. One cannot hurry it…
I think of the times I’ve been impatient with myself, for not being faster, smarter, quicker, brighter.. worked myself up to an irritated state. My immaturity made me rely on the purely visible aspect, completely overlooking the very important energy flowing under the surface.
Magic was unfolding but I didn’t have the eyes to see it. My own growth as a person was invisible to me. So many times things are done before one is really ready for it. Yet, one is egged on by desires of other people. We forget that no fruit ripens overnight. It is a slow, magical process, needing immense nurturing and protection. It takes time.
Being amidst nature, seeing its ebb and flow, seeing first-hand, the cycle of birth, death, rejuvenation..brings the picture of all life into clearer, sharper, perspective. Those completely in sync with their true nature, don’t let people hurry them, they refuse to rise to any bait. They attempt to be unified within. As the opening lines of ‘Desiderata’ so eloquently states, “Go placidly amid the noise and haste and remember what peace there may be in silence …”
Everytime I feel things are not going well, I think of that little shoot, full of hidden mysteries, having a world of action within but letting no one get a hint of just what it was in the process of creating. All events in life are hiding results in them, only our patience and time will bring them forth, till then, all we can do is ‘hang in there’ and even if we look dead to the world, there’s still a surprising amount of life in us…