Avocados are a virtue

I’m bringing the guacamole to the party… in 13 years!

This is the 100 year old avocado tree in our back yard. Beautiful.

I just found out that it takes 5-13+ years for an avocado tree grown from seed to bear fruit! Whoaholymybatmanthatsalongtimegoodness!

That made me realize that if we all understood how long it really takes for nature to move, for a tree to run it’s natural course, and we were the specific person that tended to that tree for all of those years, we would respect them in a totally different way. If I cared for a tree for 12 years and it got sick and died that year, the year before it fruited, I would be so attached to it at that point that I would weep.

Yes, I would cry selfishly out of sadness that I went that long spending time, energy, and fertilizer money on my tree baby and I never got to eat a piece of its fruit. Getting that close and then having it not happen would make me thoroughly angry for a long time. Not at the tree, but just at something. I would shake my fist in the air and say yelling words cursingly! Or vice versa.

But I also would cry because after 12 years, the tree would be my dear friend. I would have learned to love it not just for its fruit bearing potential, but because it sat by my side and laughed when I laughed and cried when I cried. Or would have, if it could. The same way that if I could have not laughed when I laughed or not cried when I cried, but just stood grounded by its side as it went through life, I would. It would be a part of whatever home I call home. And its livingness would be very apparent to me.

No wonder the native Americans respected their environment so much more than many of us do. They understood it. They knew it. They lived as it lived. I think my mind is going to explode with all of this learning about nature. I’m becoming closer to it in my heart and as I do, I keep seeing how much further away I was than I thought.

So excited to see what becomes of these little avocado seeds. It’s all a lesson.

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