An Expression of the Soul

When I arrived in India from Mozambique, I first went to my mother and asked, “May I plant a lemon tree in your yard?” 

“My son, I am getting old. Young trees need watering. Who will care for it when I am gone? If there’s no one to care for it, that will hurt my soul,” she answered.

I went to one of my friends. “May I plant a lemon tree in your yard?”

“Soon I am going to move to another house,” my friend said. “Who will take care of your tree then?” But he took me to the home of his father-in-law, who had a large yard and a gardener to tend his plants.

“May I plant a lemon tree in your yard?” I asked.

“I already have two lemon trees,” he told me. “What will I do with a third one?”

That afternoon I was dejected and sobbed like a child. “O God, why is this happening? I can’t convince anyone to plant trees, not even my own mother. I can’t do it on my own. I need your help.”

A familiar calmness fell over me. Within minutes, my mother, who did not know about my crying, asked me to take her to see a healer in a nearby village. He had become well known for healing people by merely touching the water containers they would drink from.

When we arrived, there was a long line of people carrying bottles of water to have the healer touch. He touched everyone’s bottle, including my mother’s, but when it was my turn, he waved me off and said, “You come back tomorrow.”

I had no interest or intention to return the next day—or ever. But for some reason, the next afternoon, I had an urge to go see the man. Several miles from the village, two people were standing at an intersection, and they stopped my car.

Angrily, they asked, “What took you so long? We’ve been waiting for you since morning.”

“I never said I would come,” I told them.

“You were ordered to come,” they replied.

They got into the car and when we reached the village, the healer, a frail man, invited me into a small mud hut and told his assistants to tell all the people in line they must wait because his friend had arrived. We entered the hut and he laid down on a small cot. I sat on the floor beside him.

He started speaking and I soon became bored. I hadn’t gone there to listen to his lecture. After ten minutes, a thought emerged, and I asked, “Would you bless a few lemon trees for me?”

“Why?” he asked. I noticed that he did not act surprised at my question, as if he were expecting it.

“You touch a glass of water, and a person who drinks that water is healed,” I said. “Imagine how many people might be healed by eating the fruits from trees you have touched.”

The healer shook his head and said in a calm voice, “If you are talking about the good it will do for others, then you also will have a hidden agenda and wonder what good it will do for you.”

“The trees you bless will have children and grandchildren,” I told the healer. “They will spread all over the country. You will become very famous.”

The healer smiled and said, “If someone wants fame for me, that person will also want fame for himself. A man who seeks fame is like a dog that wags his tail to please people and get a reward. Are you comparing me to a dog?”

Having acquired the skills of salesmanship, I knew that I should not give up, and I tried again. “How about planting a seed and not worrying about the fruits it will give?” I asked. This surprised me, because not only was I quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, the holy book of Hindus, but I was speaking in the healer’s colloquial dialect.

At that, the healer jumped up and with fire in his eyes proclaimed, “Yes! Yes! Plant trees only because that is the nature of your soul, your being. Then the whole world will join you. Do it not because it will do good for others or bring fame to you.”

He was looking straight at me and added, “I will be glad to perform the act of blessing. But remember, I am like a lightbulb, and the power comes from its source. If you want to serve people, then you have to go to the source itself.”

I provided the funds for several of my friends to buy all the lemon saplings they could acquire from the nurseries in the area. The healer blessed 2,500 lemon saplings.

Over the next few days, people patiently lined up to receive a blessed lemon sapling from the healer. Each person pledged to use the seeds from their tree’s lemons to plant 18 more trees. They were no longer just recipients. They were now part of a chain, a vision, to help each other.

But the impact of my meeting with the healer went far beyond that. He not only blessed those saplings, he gave me the key that unlocked my entire path forward. Internally, he completely turned me around. He helped me realize that the motivation to serve was not about what I would gain, nor even how it might help others. The key was simply to do whatever is a natural expression of one’s soul.