The Kitchen Garden Novice Gleans

Lookee what I found on my walk today! The bones of long dead cacti are fairly common here in the Southwest, but totally unexpected where I spotted it. The skeleton lay on the sidewalk in front of our local grade school. There are no cacti in the vicinity, for the obvious reasons. Schools don't usually landscape with sharp, thorny plants. "Can you say 'liability,' boys and girls?"

I presume this honeycombed carcass was carried and discarded by a child on the way to school. Cactus bones such as these are used in quite a few neighborhood yards as ornamental offerings to Mother Nature.

But to find it on the sidewalk--it positively screamed to me, "TAKE ME HOME!"

First let me say that I am not a collector. I seldom feel the need to gather treasures, just to take them home. For example, on one of my walks, I spotted an amputated leg from some poor Barbie doll. Day after day, I took the same route, just to see if Barbie's missing limb was still there. Never did I feel the compulsion to pick it up and bring it home, even though my writer's whimsy conjured all sorts of imagined scenarios for its dismemberment. But I digress...

Some might call me a scavenger. I prefer to view it as gleaning. Sounds so much more benevolent, doesn't it?  And gleaning has served me well. When that darn rosemary refused to germinate in my kitchen garden, the Universe sent me sprouts in my old rosemary beds to glean. It would have been an offense to Mother Nature not to do so. But this cactus skeleton could serve no real purpose for me, could it? And to call this gleaning would require that I had some purpose or plan for carrying it home. The first two exercises in A Course in Miracles assert that nothing we encounter has any meaning other than that which we attribute to it. Was I reading too much into my serendipitous discovery? Probably. But I have to believe that if the Universe led me to notice that skeleton, it intended it to have some meaning for me. So I guess I'll just have to take an "F" in Miracles 101. 

The cactus skeleton came home with me. Stay tuned...