Low Hanging Fruit

Delectable

I love the image of low hanging fruit. It is luscious to think of pickable pears, appealing apples, scintillating citrus, all within reach. I recall picking plums in Italy… my mouth waters at the thought of those ripe yellow flavour packed plums. That tree was planted for me. That is how I treated the fruit of its labour… I ate with abandon. The tree dripped its prize and I drank deeply. 

Personifying fruit

I think of the health of a tree. How a healthy tree will produce healthy and abundant fruit. A sick tree simply cannot do this, and the resultant fruit can grow but in a distorted and abnormal fashion, a semblance of itself: something short of what it could be but somehow not looking like its fully potentialize(d) fruit brothers and sisters, cousins, uncles and aunts, and ultimately, its great great grandparents. Of course, we, you and I, both know that I am personifying fruit, dear reader… I am not the first to do this, I follow in mighty leader footsteps.

“For a good tree does not bear bad fruit, nor does a bad tree bear good fruit. For every tree is known by its fruit. For men do not gather figs from thorns, nor do they gather grapes from a bramble bush” (Luke 6:43-44).

Rotten or edible?

Unresolved issues

This theme of low hanging fruit came to me as I thought about unresolved issues, the kinds we all have as individuals. These unaddressed soul wounds are a lot like heavy hanging rotten fruit, over ripe and no longer palatable let alone nutritiously fulfilling. Can you see this too, dear reader, people sagging with the weight of a past, their own or that of a fellow fruit, I mean relative, rotting them from the inside out? I don’t know about you but I will be damned, yes, this devoted Christian woman referenced damning, if I ever become the type of person that does not process my pain so that I never become rotten.

“A good man out of the good treasures of his heart brings forth good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart brings forth evil. For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45).

Look at your heart

So here is the challenge and the work. You look at your heart, right here, right now, and ask yourself, what is in there? Once you have done this, ask yourself, what comes from my mouth? Is what comes from me alive and affirming or is it rotten and unworthy of consumption? If what you say edifies another, gives them hope and reason to keep going, living, loving, trying, than you are a tree of life to others dear one. Dare I say what you are to others when the opposite is true? Must I fill in the blanks here? 

Unresolved family tree issues, problems, habits, rituals, modes of being that are unhealthy, unsavoury, repulsive and death inducing must be addressed so that the fruit of your labour can produce life affirming deliciousness, that all can see and experience in your loving presence. 

We cannot hide

We are known dear one. We cannot hide from the many eyes that follow us to and fro. We each get to decide: every day, in every way. Are you yummy, or just plain old rotten?