Finally!
After seven, if not nine years of waiting, (has the year 2009 got something to do with this?), one of our plants started to bear flowers. It is a very ordinary plant but each day that I see it when I go in and out of our place, I would always ask myself when would I ever see its red flowers.
We also have another plant they call the “miracle fruit.” With it in your tongue you will be able to take the most sour tasting fruit that you may want to eat. It “miraculously” lessens or decreases the sour taste level to a degree that won’t make your face as “sour” as the fruit that you are eating.
Miracle Fruit
When I bought it more than two years ago, I was told that it was ready to bear fruits as it was already mature. It was then bearing plenty of tiny white flowers like fireflies in moonlit night. (I will never forget a fairy-tale looking sight in an Indian village when I saw thousands of fireflies along the winding river). But I was disappointed. The plant has grown taller than I am by now and has so far reached the blooming level only. Oh well, that’s what I thought.
This week, when I saw the plant with red flowers at last, I approached the miracle fruit plant and talked to it: “Ikaw, kailan ka magbubunga?” (When are you going to bear fruit?). To my surprise, I saw under its leaves one and only one fruit among the so many flowers it is bearing. The color is also red and it took years before I saw for myself that it is actually bearing “a fruit.” I was ecstatic!
The third miracle fruit that I picked! It measures approximately three-fourths of an inch.
Moreover, seeing that our bamboo-looking plant has become so matured it started bearing flowers too added to my happiness. (They say it is a bamboo variety. Pity that I don’t know the names of our plants!)
On top of everything—when I see our dog with its three puppies, I see the metaphor of “bearing fruits and flowers,” “bearing children and puppies,” “bearing the fruits of love, labor and patience.” The personal advocacy films that I have done were literally “fruits of labor and patience.” All of them were born after many months. Except for the children and puppies, all took not less than one-and-a-half years of toil and patience. My friend Janus calls them “labor bearing fruits.”
Couples need to wait for nine months and a mother need to labor before her baby is born, plants need to be patiently watered daily to grow and flower, puppies need to be fed and taken cared of to live and grow too. So, what more our children who must be loved and embraced, irrespective of their being “regular” or “special.”
With respective to my advocacy film work, I take time to make one. I really laboooooor. When I finish one, it is joy that I feel. It is not much different to how I feel seeing our plants flower, watching wild flowers bloom, seeing a butterfly out of its cocoon fly to freedom, seeing thousands of angels walk for autism…
Angels Walk for Autism, January 18, 2009
(To view when angels walked for autism last January 18, click http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgi8Ud8TZPc
It is joy seeing in others how my films give hope and uplift spirits, seeing the spark in the eyes of those who acknowledge how my labor bearing films affect them and the understanding that sinks into the consciousness of those who are ignorant of my subject’s condition—that special children should not be treated as “Others”—that I really feel and enjoy the “fruits of my labor.”
The reward is psychic. It can’t be stolen. It can only be enjoyed, treasured and cherish.
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