For the last few months I’ve been watching a tomato plant grow in the gap between the road and the pavement outside my office. Nobody planted it. Nobody waters it. It simply came up in a crack in the gutter, hemmed in by kerbstone on one side and passing tyres on the other, with crisp packets and cans for company. And yet every week there’s a little more of it.
What makes it more remarkable is that this has been the hottest, driest summer we’ve had in years. The gardens people fuss over have gone brown; hoses and watering cans haven’t been enough. Conditions could hardly have been worse for a plant with a few inches of grit to root in. But it has kept going anyway – flowering, sending its roots down somewhere deeper than the heat can reach.
It reminded me of what I’ve taken from the Tao, and from wu wei in particular: the idea of acting without forcing, of working with what is actually in front of you rather than fighting it. The plant doesn’t argue with the drought or resent the litter. It doesn’t waste anything on wishing it had been sown in a nice raised bed. It just does the one thing it can do, in the place it happens to be, and that turns out to be enough.
I think there’s something in that for the rest of us. We don’t get to choose where we land, and often enough it feels like we’ve been dealt a bum hand – the wrong role, the wrong timing, less than we needed. But being grateful for where we’ve landed isn’t resignation; it’s what frees up the energy we’d otherwise spend on resentment. Whatever crack in the gutter we’ve been given, the work is to root into it and make the best of it – and quietly, without permission, hopefully it will produce fruit.
The Tomato at the Roadside
The road was made for going.
The seed did not go.
It fell, and stayed, and so arrived.
Nothing chose this place.
A crack in the kerb, a breath of grit,
a crushed can holding yesterday's rain.
The plant does not call it poor soil.
It calls it soil.
The gardener labours over straight rows,
measures water, argues with the weather,
and still the harvest is uncertain.
Here, unwatched, unwanted, unnamed,
the flowers still bloom,
the fruit will still redden.
This is the doing that is not doing.
Wrappers gather at its foot like students.
It teaches them nothing.
They learn.
What is thrown away is not gone.
The apple core in the passing hand,
the careless window, the summer road,
even refusal carries the seed.
The way makes use of what we discard;
we call it accident because we were not asked.
Ten thousand cars pass and see litter.
One walker stops and sees a vine.
Neither the litter nor the vine has changed.
The plant does not resist the tyre.
It grows to one side.
It does not curse the drought.
It sends its root deeper, where the road cannot look.
Yielding, it holds the ground
that the concrete could not keep.
It has no fence, no label, no price.
Therefore no one can take it from itself.
Having nothing, it lacks nothing.
In autumn it goes brown and is not troubled.
It has already given its fruit to the dark,
to the gutter, to the crack,
to next year's stranger.
The sage is like the roadside tomato:
living where placed,
feeding what does not thank her,
growing without permission,
and leaving, in the litter,
something worth bending down for.
