You cannot force someone to comprehend a message they are not ready to receive. Still, you must never underestimate the power of planting a seed. – unknown.
I hate to waste stuff. With each deposit in the garbage, I see its trip to the landfill. We don’t compost yet, but I’m not letting go of the notion. Monday is often mussel day at our house. When dinner is over, I walk the shells out to the Hawaiian Tea Tree plant in the back yard, just past the yoga platform and the overgrown ginger plant. It seems to act like nutrients on it. It’s flourished. We have bird feeders, but we also note, catalog, and occasionally record and photograph backyard wildlife.
So, we end up tossing food the critters might like, vegetables, mostly right out the back door under and beyond the bird feeders. We see evidence that they enjoy the fresh treats, too, as they get relocated. Our dog gets a raw marrow bone every morning, and when he’s done, we toss those out there, too. Occasionally we see the bones on top of the pool cage. Can you imagine the little squiggles dragging them up there? I’ve never seen it, but I know they have.
Still, the critters never seemed to like tomatoes. Surprising, but often they just lay out there looking like the dog’s kong.
In the last month, those randomly tossed tomatoes began to grow. They had blossoms, and now, sizable green tomatoes are growing. Four plants have bloomed without fertilizers or pesticides and because it’s been dry—very little water. But those tomato plants, they found a way.
It made me think about the casual, but the benevolent tossing of the tomatoes.
If we just walked through life tossing seeds to actual people? What if we took some of our abundance and just shared it? Happiness. Enthusiasm. Compassion. Empathy. Kindness. For those who have so much, it makes sense to share it.
These days we are not in close contact with too many others, particularly strangers, even so, there are opportunities. They don’t have to be big gestures. They are seeds, after all.
My mother’s visiting nurse cried harder than almost anyone when she passed. She told me that mom used to thank her for coming and tell her that she could go back to school, she could be a nurse. And, she did.
Today, as I weeded the area behind the retaining wall, there were tomatoes growing in the weeds. Presumably moved there from those tossed out the back door. Some people are like that too, tossed into rough terrain, physical or emotional, they manage to find a way to survive, then grow. I didn’t scatter those seeds, but they arrived, and they thrived.
I tossed rotten tomatoes and they grew into abundance. Imagine what can happen with a person if I scatter seeds of happiness, enthusiasm, compassion, kindness. Or if I just wrote a check?
Every day that I look outside and see those tomato plants, they remind me that I can do better, that I can scatter seeds, and, that every there and again, one may take root and grow.