The riddle of the vine - Tessa Afshar.

The vine needs to suffer. Going down into this earth-fighting to survive among stones, among the lime rock-this is what gives it its from. Its taste. Its unique character. These grapes will create a wine few other vineyards can compare with not because their life was easy, but because they had to struggle to survive. 

The vine needs to suffer? To be at its best, it needs to suffer, yes. And fight.

I’m sorry for it, then. No creature should have to bear pain. 

Pain is part of this life. No one can escape suffering. Not the vine, nor we humans, as you well know, my lady. But what if we are like the vine and that affliction only makes us better? 

Consider, my lady, I’m the gardener and I know what the vine needs in order to thrive. You only see the stripping, but I cut the vine in order to restore it. I take away from it to enrich it. You hold in your hand a withering branch and that’s all you see now, but I know that I have given the vine a more abundant life.

Two things tole my breath as Bardia taught me the riddle of the vine.

- First, that suffering improved the character of the vine’s fruit. Perfect ease and comfort would only ruin it. If my life were anything akin to the vine, then these calamities I bore need not ruin me. They could very well be my redemption.

- Second, come the right season, Bardia, the expert gardener, Bardia, the tender caretaker, Bardia, the one on whom these plants depended in order to survive, slashed and hacked into the vine. He added to its suffering. He stripped it until, from my vantage point at least, there was hardly any life left. Yet the vine needed his implacable care. Bard had claimed that he cut the vine in order to restore it; he took away from it to enrich it. 

I knew that he was selective in what he called the vines suffering. He would not allow pests to brutalise the plants, for example, or let weeds anywhere near them. Though he was shorthanded, i had seen no sign of a weevil or beetle near the crop. he knew what to destroy, what to improve, what to protect.

Was I one of God’s little vines? Was he the Bardia of my soul? Did he shield me from what would destroy me? Was he stripping me now on purpose only to give me a more abundant life? Would I, one day, bear fruit worthy of a king’s table?

The thought bought tears to my eyes. I would not let them fall. I gripped the dying branch Bardia had cut until my fingers grew numb. This was the life I wanted, and God had taken it from me. I did not want more abundant fruit. I just wanted what I’d had before.

- Excerpt from Harvest of Rubies by Tessa Afshar.