When I saw the tiny maple leaves, just emerged from the tip of a branch, I thought about watching one of those time lapse movies. You know, the ones where you see a whole day sweep by from sunrise to dusk in a mere minute or two.
I imagined a little maple seed, the kind that twirls to the ground on helicopter wings, settling into the soil, sprouting, enduring a winter, coming back taller and stronger each spring until one day, it stood before me, a proud little sapling, unfolding its bright new leaves. Soon it will produce helicopter seeds of its own, and the story will go on and on.
The thought reminded me of an exercise I learned once where you traveled back through the history of something to appreciate all that contributed to its presence in your life. If you were eating an apple, for instance, you could trace it back to the store where you bought it and think about all the people who were involved in operating the store. Someone ordered it; someone sold it to the store; someone unpacked it from its crate and set it out for display.
Before that, it traveled on a truck that came from a distributor who bought it from an orchard. The truck had a driver, who worked for a company that bought produce and delivered it to stores. And the truck traveled over roads that were imagined and engineered and built and maintained.
The apple was one of many dozens that came from a tree that thrived in an orchard, soaking in a summer’s sun and rain. And before that it was a blossom, tended by bees, growing on the tree that produced the seed from which it grew. When it ripened, someone picked it and placed it in the crate that was loaded onto the truck.
And now it was in your hand, and you would bite it and taste what how delicious it was and how crisp and juicy and sweet its flesh. And it would nurture you. You were the whole reason it came to be. You and the workers in the orchard, and the builders of crates and trucks and roads and grocery stores.
It’s a worthwhile exercise. It broadens your sense of the connectedness of things and leads you to appreciate the wonder of life’s endless unfolding. And in the end, it leads you to the big questions: How did it all come to be? Where did it come from? Why am I, a tiny life form on a small speck of planet in the midst of a giant and dazzling universe, capable of wondering why? And how am I so lucky to be holding this apple right in my very own hand?
Wishing you a week of sweet wonders, my friends.
Warmly,
Susan