When an idea takes flight in the confines of my mind, it grows sticky limbs and cling to other ideas. But when I start pouring it out on paper and talk about it with listeners and discerners, it becomes useful, like a cup at a fountain, a cup that can be used to draw water, to quench a parched thirst. So, this idea is explorative, searching, still growing. Please listen to it with your heart and evaluate it with your spirit. Please leave a comment or send an email?
Has a story like this been told before? And yet it sounds so familiar, as old as the substance that created everything you can see and touch. In a world, as plain and simple as the time when trains ran on steam and planes was made of material. Yes, when factories created useful items, but also things of destruction. When wars were fought between people of difference and scares resources, but ultimately for power, in whichever form they could obtain. Those people who were able to create the most things tended to become the most powerful. ‘Life became simple’, the old wise people used to tell us.
In those simple times, a simple man had a simple and small garden. He toiled in it from time to time. He only had time when he was not busy at the factory making gears and bolts from heavy metals. Gears and bolts that was used to made other machinery, that made other machinery, to make it easier to fashion more things. More things that people sold and consumed.
Evan was a good worker, a good man. Life was simple and repetitive, like the ‘up and down’ turning of a steam piston on one of those trains that took him from his piece of land in the country to the big smoggy city. When he was not working in the heat of the furnace, he walked around the country, with his dog ‘Ghost’, a liver and white ticked German Shorthaired Pointer. They would walk about looking at the people’s gardens, sometimes they would go in and visit, but not many times. Strange though, as every visit to someone else’s garden would invigorate him, would give him meaning.
Every night just after the last sunrays were swept up into dusk, clouds would appear and it would rain for an hour or two, never more, never less. This was a blessing for the countryside, for everywhere man did not garden nature flourished on this outpouring. Nature celebrated by growing and bringing forth fruit and food for the animals of every kind. Yet man could not share in those spoils. The people in this world did plant and did eat, but it was not the same.
Before each sunset, Evan, would take a clay pot, that his parents gave him, and place it out on the back steps of his humble home. It would fill up in the constant downpour in the evening and in the morning, he would pour it out in his garden. This would give life to his little garden, make the flowers bloom and the trees bear fruit.
Sometimes, Evan would be so preoccupied with other things, with his work or something else, that he would forget to water the garden. Sometimes he would see no point in doing it. Sometimes he would feel frustrated when he measured his garden to the other gardens in the countryside. Sometimes he would let it slide for the day, because he just felt like lying on the couch, even though, Ghost would growl at him, reminding him to water his garden.
When he would remit on watering his garden, something terrible would happen. The water in the clay pot would turn lifeless, it would be useless. This was not good for his garden; and it slowly started to dry up, even though there was a downpour every day. With time his garden would not grow, as it was not watered from the clay pot. It would become dry and desolate. Without a garden, the mysterious reason for living, people would not want to visit Evan anymore or give glory to the Potter, the creator of everything.
