Potting tomato

starts.  Wet earth.  They stand straight with

 new plant dignity.

That was the first Saturday in March I did that and wrote that.

I put the newly potted tomatoes by a window.  Even though they are under a powerful set of grow lights, they still are bending towards the sun.

I felt the truth and poignancy that the very source of their growth, the thing towards which they all strive, was the thing that made them bent.

Does even growth bend us?  Perhaps especially growth bends us.  We are none of us fully in the light or able to bear it (just like the tomato starts, in fact).  We are all of us in our own little corners, growing towards what light we can see, bending and twisting in the process.

Sometimes when I think about the human condition I feel a great compassion.

We tend to think that it is only sin that ruins us (though even sin is usually a distorted growth towards something that in itself is one part of the light).  But I felt when I saw the tomatoes that all of us grow crooked and necessarily so.  We must grow but growing we must bend–this is strongly implied in the story of the incompatible commandments in the garden–and so tragedy and the Atonement are written into life at the heart.