Copycat

Mom, look at the tree I made!

I was up to my ears in the pile of dirt and cow manure when my junior assistant gardener called my attention to what she’d been busily doing most of the morning.

Hon, you don’t MAKE trees, you PLANT them, I was about to correct her linguistic latitude, when I turned around and looked in her direction.

Well, perhaps I was wrong… I guess you COULD make trees… sort of! I thought.

For, inside our small vegetable plot there stood a tree - if one could call a tree what in actuality, was a medium size broken off and dried up branch, stuck as firmly as her tiny hands would allow into the sandy ground. I was taken aback. Nowhere in nature have I ever seen a tree quite like this one. It was impressive. It was glorious. Every square inch of its brittle branches was covered with every blooming flower found in our garden that day – there were day lilies, and passionflower, and impatience, and azaleas, and spider lilies, star jasmine, and four-o’clock,.. . I looked around the back yard. Except for the blazing tree, all the other plants and shrubs were stark naked, their every last bloom effectively picked clean, carefully transferred and attached to the dead branch.

Wow! What can I say, hon?!!! It’s… it’s gorgeous!

She admired her work for a while, then dusted her hands off and proudly trotted off into the house. Her work in the garden was finished for the day.

I stand next to the flaming bush wilting quickly under the blaze of Florida sun and reflect on my own daily work and ‘glorious achievements' in the garden of life. Part of me wonders whether the effect is much different from what my little apprentice has accomplished today. Having neither courage, nor skill nor patience required for authentic growth, I hop around life like a restless mountain goat, diligently picking clean the blooms from other bushes. Once satisfied with my exotic collection, I artificially try to attach it to the dried-up twig of my own life, in hope that the plagiarized blooms of others would cover up the impotence of my shriveled heart. For a short while my tree may look quite impressive - like a Disney cartoon on steroids! But soon enough the ruthless heat-waves of life wither it up, launching me on another quest after the phantom, now further and faster, in desperate search for other extraordinary blooms growing in other people’s yards. And all along, the grotesque irony of the vicarious blooming seem to escape my notice. By the end of the day, I have a feeling that something has just slipped through my fingers, but I am too exhausted from the chase to consider the insanity… All I can hear in the back of my tired soul is a distant echo…

…a copycat of a copycat, a shadow of a shadow…

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. John 15:4