Quick what if:
What if the “low hanging fruit” metaphor, you know, easy to grab and eat, no real challenge to the task…often applied to those more innocent ones susceptible for sly foxes to take advantage….
What if the joke is on the fox?
Like, the fruit is aware of its vulnerability, its placement at the fringe of the tree, hanging far from the safety of the higher branches.
But the seed inside the fruit, if not broken completely (and usually not crushed because of the carelessness and greed with which sly fox devours it) will start a journey that ultimately uses the foxes ways to outlive and overshadow any of the fox’s wildest dreams.
What happens to the lowly fruit?
Yes, it is digested. Gone into the fox’s gullet, apparently consumed by his force.
But the seed is not. The sweet and soft seemingly stripped away, only a tiny bare bit left - the seed remains.
The core of that fruit intact, with inherent plans for new life, makes its journey in the dark through the terrible insides of the one who stole its place in the sun.
The seed escapes, among the waste from the creature, after having survived the belly of the beast.
Finding itself in unfamiliar grounds, warmed to grow again in the sun, the seed sends out tender parts of itself, anchoring into the earth to reconnect to nourishment. New growth may find another unprotected landscape, but trusts in the messages from winds and stars, and blooms where it is planted.
Instead of a single seed, now she stands tall - a majestic fruit tree, solid in her power, and sharing her blossoms in beauty and fragrance, carried on the wind to lands a flightless animal will never reach.
When a single blossom finds the space of her evolution again outgrown, before it withers on the stem, shares her essence with starseeds and gives nectar to new yield. Bright and full of life, fed by the source of abundance that supports all who breathe the blue planet’s air, the multiplicity of fruit waits pregnant with possibility.
Understanding that whether to the birds who make their home in her protective branches, to the mice who toil for reward, or to another sly fox, her fruit is a gift of the life freely given to all, in the endless procession of birth and death under the sun.
She knows not consciously of her future, and yet recognizes that the journey to fullness in some way required the fox, who has long past made his own way into the dust at her feet.
She smiles as a tear comes to shed the fear and confusion she felt in the darkness, blown away by the breeze as another season changes.