Friday, September 08, 2017

The Parable of the Plants

I was dreaming, and in my dream I saw a vast plain, stretching to the horizon.  A high wall of solid rock divided the plain, so that one side of the wall was in brilliant sunlight, and the other in perpetual shadow, with only a kind of twilight from the glow on the other side of the wall. All over the plain there were green plants. On the sunlit side the plants were not yet fully mature, but they were flourishing, and as they grew you could see that each plant was unique, bearing its own kind of fruit or flowers. Some were bushes, some were young trees, each of them had room to spread its branches, and all of them were beautiful.

It was different on the dark side. They had rigged up artificial lights to help them grow, but the wavelength of the light was wrong somehow, and the more they leaned towards these false lights, the more their growth was distorted. Some were taller, some were shorter, some were stronger, some were weaker, but none of them bore fruit. They blamed each other for their lack of growth. “You’re crowding me!”, or,  “You’re taking my space”, or “my soil” etc., were common complaints. Everything was competitive.

Every so often the word would go around that the only way to flourish was to be uprooted from the dark side and replanted on the bright side. Occasionally a plant would cry out “I surrender!” and a giant hand would reach down from the sky, pluck it out of the ground and transport it to the other side of the wall. Most of the plants around it would be horrified, it looked like a form of death, but sometimes another plant would be moved to cry out its surrender too, and be transplanted.

And as I watched, it seemed like time was speeding up, and the dark side was growing darker, and the bright side was growing brighter …

This was my dream, make of it what you will

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