Without Mouths

There was once a valley where the soil was generous and the sky indifferent. Rain fell without devotion. The sun warmed what it could reach, but much remained hidden by the slow breath of drifting fog. In that place lived an old man who tended an orchard with no sign and no path. He lived alone, though not in solitude, for he was attended by the trees.

They were not planted in rows. He did not believe in straight lines. But he believed in listening.

He spoke to the saplings as if to children whose mother tongue was silence. He whispered prayers into the soil before burying the seed. He kissed leaves as they unfurled, not because they needed his lips but because he needed their life to remember his own.

When travelers passed on a nearby road, they could not see the orchard. It was hidden behind the hill, and those who might have eaten its fruit rarely knew they had come close. Birds came. Bees came. But no merchant ever came. No child ever plucked a pear and laughed its juice onto his shirt. No poet wandered through with a notebook full of longing. The trees bore fruit anyway.

The old man watered. He trimmed. He waited.

Once, a passerby found him kneeling beneath the branches of a fig tree, his hand over a fruit, over-ripened and lying in the dirt.

“You live here alone?” the traveler asked.

“I live where the trees confess,” said the man.

“But who eats these fruits?”

The old man smiled, because the question was familiar.

“The fruit does not know who will eat it,” he said. “It grows anyway. That is its blessing. That is mine.”

The traveler frowned, unsatisfied. “But what is the purpose of sweetness, if it never lands on the tongue?”

At this the old man rose slowly, wiping his palms on his pants.

“Ah, but you are young,” he said. “You believe that taste is the end of growth. That the reward of the tree is in the mouth. But sweetness is not made for the eater. Sweetness is proof. It is how the tree remembers that it lived.”

The traveler looked upon the trees, each bowing gently in the breeze. Some had fruits fat with waiting. Some had only blossoms. Some had already given what they could and stood bare.

“So you grow these knowing no one may eat them?”

The old man nodded.

“To grow what may never be tasted,” he said, “simply because it is real. This is the labor of the true. The poem that may never be read. The kindness that may never be returned. The love that may never be reciprocated. All of it grows the soul. All of it matters. Even if it vanishes.”

The traveler stood silent, his throat tight.

“And what happens when you die?” he asked.

The old man looked to the hill.

“Then the orchard will dream without me,” he said. “And if no one finds it, then let the wind eat the apples. Let the bees take their share. Let the earth reclaim what the tree offered. It wasn’t for them. It was because I had hands. ”

And with that, he bent once more over a young branch, tying it with care to a stake, to keep it from breaking under its own promise.

That night the traveler sat beside the trees, plucking a plum that fell near his foot. He tasted it slowly, as if it were a secret. And though he would leave at dawn and never return, he would tell of this orchard again and again, though he never found the way back.

For some things are not planted for markets, nor praise. Some things grow for the sake of growth.

For the wild obedience to being. And this, too, is love.