Heroes Not Zombies

Yesterday I posted about the leaves appearing on the mulberry tree in my garden.

The day after I looked at these unfurling little leaves unfurling from the swollen ends of the woody twigs I took another look. I noticed something strange about the leaves now. They had strange tufts of what looked a bit like green hair now. Then when I looked closer I realised that these new forms were the beginnings of the fruit.

These are mulberries, or, maybe its more accurate to say these are “becoming mulberries”.

Aren’t they the strangest looking creatures?

Over the coming days and weeks they will swell and change colour ripening as a dark, dark red, almost black fruit. The first year I lived here was the first time I’d seen them and I didn’t actually notice them until they were ripe. My initial impression was that they were little bugs on the tree but I quickly discovered that they were in fact fruit. The second year there were hardly any at all. But this year it looks as if almost every single leaf has its own fruit. I’ve never seen so many.

I know that this fruit doesn’t quite undergo the metamorphoses of butterflies whose life stages seem to belong to different creatures. But seeing this fruit at such an early stage makes me think of how we all change so much throughout our lives.

This is one of the reasons I have that byline at the top of my blog – becoming not being. Living creatures are so hard to pin down. They never stop changing, growing, and developing. And we can never understand anyone by just considering one small part of their life, one small timespace of their life.

We are all unique in so many ways. Seeing the unfolding emergence of an individual over the course of a whole life is one of the greatest, most exciting, gifts anyone could have. I’m so grateful I had the opportunity to get to know and work with so many patients over the course of medical career.

How amazing Life is!