Chapter 22 Red October (3)

There is a cleaner who cleans my house three hours a day, but the plants can only be looked after by my mother.This is an incredible sprinkler.She has two watering cans, one with fertilizer and the other without lime, and not only that, she also has a multi-purpose sprayer that can be "targeted", "rained" or "misted" to spray.Every morning she went over the twenty pots of green plants in her room, and was always muttering a lot of nonsense and being indifferent to the world around her.You can talk all you want while Mom is preoccupied with her plants, whatever, her mind is totally off of it.For example, "I plan to take drugs today, and I will take a lot of drugs." The answer I got was: "The roots of the leaves of the Kentia palm tree are yellow, and they have been watered too much. It is really bad."

We have deduced the beginning of this paradigm: If you want to waste your life any faster, and be more careless to what others say, look after the plants.But things didn't stop there.When my mother sprayed water on the leaves of the plants, I saw the hope that brought her vitality.She thinks that water is a kind of fragrance, which will penetrate into the leaves of the plant, and will give the plant the ingredients it needs in order to grow, and the same with fertilizer.She puts the little sticks of compost into the soil (actually, in a mix of soil, humus, sand, peat, made especially for her at a garden supply store in Porte d'Auteuil). prepared for each potted plant).So mother feeds her plants as she feeds her own children: water and nourishment to the Kentia palm, as green beans and vitamin C do to us.And this is the key to this paradigm: to be wholehearted to the object of support, to bring nutrients to it from the inside out, and after entering the body, to make it grow and make it healthy.Just sprinkle some water on the leaves and these plants are armed to the challenge of survival.We look after plants with mixed feelings of melancholy and hope, we are aware of the fragility of life, we are afraid of accidents, but at the same time, doing what should be done, and the satisfaction of being able to fulfill the responsibility of caregivers: we feel reassured , for a while we were on the safe side.That's how my mother saw life: a series of exorcisms, as ineffective as spraying water, brought this moment of safety.

If we share our insecurities together, if we start to go through our hearts together to tell ourselves that green beans and vitamin C, even though they can feed the soul, can't save lives, let alone purify the soul, then, Might be better.