There is no better smell than a ripe Meyer Lemon.
It has taken a few years since Winter Storm Uri for my new trees to make some fruit. For my garden to heal. And for me to heal as well – from a different kind of storm.
Some destructive forces in our lives can be recovered from more easily than others.
The experience of storms of nature can be embraced as some painful inevitability of living in the natural world and the choices we’ve made along the way. We built on a swamp and staked our future on a messy unpredictable coast. Storms come. Water rises. Here we are. This is our home.
But there is another kind of disaster that I have found to be much more difficult to incorporate. More painful to accept. Betrayals. Lies. Deliberate acts of destruction. Planned cruelties. Intentional infliction of horror and harm.
I am no great example of how to get through, get over, get around the anger and bitterness that follow betrayal and violence. Learning once again that there are those who get up and make a plan to inflict harm.
They’re not regular people who occasionally hurt one another – as we all do unintentionally – stumbling or storming along.
No, they nursed their animus and hatred and cultivated it into a well constructed plan.* Going after the soft and vulnerable spaces. Where we love. Where we celebrate. Where we breathe.
I have found it hard to incorporate this awareness. Struggled to accept. Even in the small way my own life has been impacted by people who set out to intentionally hurt me. I have wanted to believe something different about them because the true horror for me is not in what they did to me or my family but in the fact that they meant to do it.
I asked a wise friend “are there evil people”? And she said “there are people who become evil by their choices.”
This truth fully landed again this week Choices. There are people choose to hurt and harm. Who relish in the suffering of others. Who come to the choice of destroying what they cannot have and relish doing it. Cultivate their rage and grievance and calculate and plan violence.
Another wise friend once told me “you can’t love people into better behavior.” I genuinely thought we could. It’s how some people were able to hurt me. I let them in, despite their ugliness, because I thought that we created a caring world and everyone invited would want to live in that covenant of mutuality. It has taken a long time for me to forgive myself for this mistake. About the same amount of time it took my trees to make fruit. Integrity and generosity are not universal aspirations.
Every arena has its feral hogs. Those that roll in and take all they can, for whom nothing is ever enough. Who show contempt for those who continue to show up to mend and tend and help. As predictable as the outpouring of generosity and solidarity, is the arrival of those feral hogs. Taking all they can Destroying everything else.
Today my responsibility is for my own garden. For growing and building. Cultivating and caring. How I choose to live. Right outside the gate is something else entirely. And just as we learn to live with a raging Gulf of Mexico and the terror of rivers out of control, we learn to live with the raging and destructive fellow human beings.
But let’s don’t make a one sided failed bargain with the world. We love because we choose to. No aspect of our devotion guarantees others will change or follow.
I wrote this for me and maybe for you.
