A creeper growing in a courtyard once had the
misfortune to have its roots and branches buried
under mounds of earth and rubble when the house
was undergoing repairs. Later, when the courtyard
was cleaned up, the owner of the house cut away
the creeper, which had been badly, damaged, and
even pulled out its roots so that it would not grow
again. The whole courtyard was then laid with
bricks and cemented over.
A few weeks later, something stirred at the place
where the creeper had been rooted out. The bricks
heaved upwards at one point as though something
were pushing them from below. This appeared very
strange, but was dismissed as being the burrowings
of rats or mice. The riddle was solved when some of
the bricks were removed, and it was discovered that
the creeper had started growing again, although in
a sadly distorted form. As it happened, not all of its
roots had been pulled out, and when the time of the
year came around for them to grow, life began to
stir within them and they pushed their way up
through the cement to the sunlight. It is one of
nature’s miracles that these tender leaves and buds,
which can be so easily crushed to a pulp between
finger and thumb, can summon up such strength as
to force their way through bricks and cement.
The owner of the house then regretted having
attempted to take the creeper’s life. He remarked,
“It is just as if it were appealing to me for the right
to grow. Now I certainly won’t stand in its way.”
And so saying, he removed some more of the bricks
so that it would grow unhindered. In less than a
year’s time, a fifteen-foot creeper was flourishing
against the courtyard wall at the exact point from
which it had been so unceremoniously ‘uprooted.’
A mountain, despite its great height and girth,
cannot remove so much as a pebble from its flanks.
But these tiny tender buds of the tree can crack a
cemented floor and sprout up through it. Whence
such power?
The source of its energy is the
mysterious phenomenon of our world called life.
Life is an astonishing, ongoing process of this
universe—a force which will claim its rights in this
world, and, even when uprooted, it continues to
exist, albeit dormant, at one place or the other and
reappears the moment it finds the opportunity. Just
when people have come to the conclusion that,
because there is nothing visible on the surface, life
must be at an end, that is just when it rears its head
from the debris.
--Maulana Wahiduddin Khan
( Ref - The Moral Vision)
