The Parable Of The Garden

Once upon a time there was a kindly old man who had a wonderful and productive garden.  He had labored endlessly for months to make the soil rich and level, well drained and open to the air and sun.  He planted seeds that would grow to fruition, and he arranged them into communities that benefited one another.  Root vegetables on one end, bean and legumes in the center, and flowering vegetables on the other end.  It was an act of love and mutual benefit as he would attend to and nurture his crop, and the crop would prosper and thus reward him with its bounty. 

For years he nurtured it, protected it, and was rewarded by its bounty of delightful vegetables and fruit. From time to time a weed would invade, and grow quickly and aggressively.  It would compete for soil space, and soon, as it towered over the native plants, it would rob them of needed sunlight.  At first he would pull the weeds, and cast them aside.  The garden was clear and healthy.  But the weeds would propagate, and were relentless in their invasion.  Each day the old man would find more and more of them, at the edges of the garden, and even now in the interior.  He'd pull those he could find, but he couldn't get them all.  Worse, the weeds were able to spread, and their roots were strong and deep.  When the old gentlemen first noticed this, he thought little of it; after all it was only a few weeds in a rather large and productive garden.  But soon it became a daily effort to rid the garden of all the weeds.  The vegetables and fruits that he had planted began to weaken as the weeds slowly took over.  Stalks became weak from a lack of nutrients, those nutrients being aggressively absorbed by the ever increasing number of weed roots.  The leaves became yellowish and drooped due to the ever increasing weed canopy robbing them of sunlight.  And now insects, which were never a serious problem for a healthy garden, were now able to take advantage of the plants' weakened condition.

To rid the garden of all the invading weeds became an ever more arduous task for the old man.  They could reproduce and invade faster than he could pull them out.  And any roots that were not removed would sprout even more weeds, made stronger by their survival. Soon the garden was all but gone, now nothing but a tract of uncontrolled and spreading weed growth.  The old man lost his bounty as all his plants died, but insisted that the weeds were not to blame.  It was only their nature, after all, he would tell himself.  But in that attempt at self consolation, he had denied and nullified his own nature.  And that nature was to protect, defend and harvest the bounty of his own labors, and for his benefit solely.  

And in that misinterpretation of the world as it truly is, the old man lost his garden to the weeds.  And soon, with no source of food, the old man, like his garden before him, wasted away and died.