surrounded by fruit
by rose sierra

When I moved to the sparse Sonoran desert in southern Arizona, my yard was unusually bountiful with trees: mesquite, palo verde, eucalyptus, three olives, two mulberries, and a lemon tree crowded with ripe lemons.

But there was one tree I could not identify. It looked like a citrus, but during the first two years there were no flowers or fruit. In the third year this mysterious tree grew thick and bushy with dark green leaves which concealed two mourning dove nests. Still, I had no idea what it was.

On a sunny day in January, I was walking the property with a couple of prospective yard workers when one of them reached deep into the tree and pulled out an orange the size of a grapefruit. My mouth dropped open. I couldn’t have been more surprised if he had pulled out a fistful of dollar bills. I pushed aside the dense foliage and saw that two huge oranges had been growing side by side.
Later when I relayed the news of this discovery to my husband, Gregg, he reported that earlier that day he, too, had found the oranges. They had grown from flower to full-grown fruit without either of us noticing, and then within hours of each other we had both found them.

This unexpected gift came at a time when Gregg and I were anxiously eying the future. It was not long after Gregg’s second book came out. While we were waiting to see how it would do, he received several lengthy phone calls from producers at the Oprah Winfrey show, promising they would call back and that there was a good possibility of his being on the show, which as Gregg says, could be the equivalent of a Midas touch to an author’s career. This immediately inflamed our fantasies. Living as artists for many years, our lifestyle was, as the writer Rita Mae Brown once observed, “not exactly designed to reassure your mother.” We imagined replacing our battered ‘79 Toyota, getting our bed off the floor, paying off our debts. Not that our lusts stopped with the practical. We also fantasized about buying exotic rugs, a second home by the sea, and sending our friends on extravagant vacations. We waited for the call like lovesick teenagers, afraid to even use the telephone fearing that Oprah would call while we were on the phone with the plumber.

We even cut short business calls, concerned about tying up the line. And of course we lunged for the phone every time it rang. But when a month went by and the call didn’t come, our excitement turned to worry. And when another month went by, the worry devolved into something akin to despair, accompanied by prayer that sounded suspiciously like begging.

This is the state we were in when we found the oranges. In the old Aramaic language, the word “satisfaction” means to be surrounded by fruit, and it wasn’t until I discovered the unexpected bounty in my proverbial backyard that I realized how dissatisfied I had become in a life filled with much to be satisfied about. The experience with the Oprah show only condensed and exaggerated this dissatisfaction, highlighting how routinely I play this drama out in many arenas of my life—work, relationship, health, even meditation. I look at Gregg, for instance, and find myself focusing on how he forgets to give me my phone messages, or finishes my sentences, or underlines in my books with a pen. I look at my spiritual practice and wonder why after 30 years of meditating my mind often resembles a swimming pool full of first-graders instead of a Zen garden. I think of my artwork and obsess about the indignities of the marketplace, instead of appreciating my talents, my progress, and that I get to paint at all.

Jelaluddin Rumi, an 11th century Sufi mystic put it this way:

“We have this way of talking, and we have another.
Apart from what we wish and what we fear may happen,
We are alive with another life,
As clear stones take form in the mountain.”

Or as oranges ripen in the shade of a tree in the backyard.

I thought the tree was barren and instead it was secretly growing fruit. I thought the future looked tenuous and missed the fullness of the present. It was a matter of shifting my angle of perception. The evening that Gregg and I found the oranges, we made them the center of a simple ritual. We sat at the kitchen table and ceremonially cut into one of the oranges, admiring its fragrance, the plush white underside of the peel, and the orange-red meat which we ate together in silence. We could have gone to the store and gotten an orange for fifty cents, but it was how the orange came to us that made it special, worth lingering over, and uncommonly delicious. We were not only enjoying an orange, we were savoring our good fortune, with or without Oprah. We expressed gratitude for our elderly Toyota and its tenacity, gratitude that we had a house and a safe place to sleep, gratitude for each other, and gratitude for a gentle reminder to be grateful.

Regarding Rose Sierra's painting on page 33:

The painting Viriditas is a word conceived by Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century mystic who after a long illness brought on by muting her self-expression, began to thrive as she set her creativity free through composing music, books and art.
Viriditas is the green, moist nourishment of nature and spirit: the ever-flowing life force: creativity itself. Having moved from the dry and muted desert to the lush and green land of the Carolinas, my eyes and my soul are brimming with viriditas.

“I am the rain coming from the dew
that causes the grasses to laugh...” Hildegard of Bingen

Viriditas IV is now available as a Giclée print. To order please call 828.696-2921