There is a grapefruit tree in my front yard that isn’t the picture of a grapefruit tree, at least not anymore. It has been old and sick-looking for all of the 27 years we have been here, and perhaps for many decades before. Its shrunken trunk is pitted and scarred. The bark, mostly gone. The limbs are mostly gone too, topped off years before we got here, someone’s last resort to keep it alive. It is quite a shambles and yet right now there are dozens and dozens of ripening grapefruits dangling from its thin and brittle branches.

I can see the tree from several vantage points inside the house, places where I’m usually lost in dystopic visions of future life on this earth, crazed in rage and terror at this country’s current self-destruction. But when I catch a glimpse of the grapefruit tree I invariably stop moping and think, “Good grief, how in the world is that thing still alive?”

It’s a good question, especially nowadays. What keeps life alive? What good remains when evil rampages? Where are love, faith, hope, and charity when all seems lost to mankind’s insatiable greed, hatred, and ignorance?

I don’t eat the grapefruits, so I’m not part of the equation here. But my husband loves them. Indeed, he prizes, nurtures, and even babies them. I think what he likes most is that he can step outside in the morning, still in his bathrobe and slippers, and pick breakfast right off the tree. Actually, he doesn’t even have to pick it, because grapefruits want so desperately to be useful that they plop right into your hands with hardly a tug. They just want to help. Even unappreciated, they are born to serve.

The whole world is like that, meaning the whole natural world. Interconnected and interdependent. All forms of life sustaining the others. My husband and the grapefruit tree have a relationship, you see. They communicate. They take care of one another, like when he puts the hose at her feet on a slow drip and then forgets about it for a day or two, the thirsty tree luxuriating in the long deep soak that only she knew she needed. Or when he bags the fruit that falls in heavy wind and stores it so it doesn’t go to waste. Picking the fruit actually serves the tree, preserving its energy so it can live longer and produce another harvest. The natural world proves over and over that beings exist to sustain one another, feed one another, appreciate one another and love one another. All part of keeping life alive.

Trees know this. Plants know this. Animals know this. Bugs and bees and birds know this. Few human beings do. They believe the opposite. They conquer, they steal, they kill, they ruin. The truth is lost on them. And when the truth is lost, everything is lost.

The facts remain: we are in this life together with all beings throughout space and time. We are sustained and supported. We are served and saved.

Sometimes it looks like an old, sick, sad grapefruit tree. But it’s not. It’s your universe, straining against all odds to give you life so that you can do the same. Care for the world you’ve been given. Care when it’s sick and rotten; care when it seems beyond all care. Care more than you’ve ever cared before. All of life depends on you and what you do when you wake up.

Silently a flower blooms
In silence, it falls away;
Yet here now, at this moment,
at this place
the whole of the flower, the whole
of the world is blooming.
— Zenkei Shibayama

Photo by Edgar Louis on Unsplash