Sublime Garden

Sublime Garden is a small town where, years ago, everything was beautiful and opulence. It was the envy of the nearby towns since everything there seemed to grow magically. The crops were abundant, and the silos were not enough to contain so much grain. The meadows had a brilliant green that when it rained, its color became even more intense and when the soft grass moved the wind, it looked like an ocean with its waves.

Vegetables grew everywhere and the animals looked overflowing, healthy. The cows and goats gave very good and abundant milk, so the settlers could make their cheeses and butter to sell to the rest of the towns that did not have their good fortune.

 It is called the Sublime Garden because there were as many species of flowers as there were stars in the sky. Its colors were beautiful, and its scents were even more so. Always flown over by bees, butterflies, and birds with their enchanting trills that gently woke up the inhabitants every morning.

The people who lived there looked happy, radiant, healthy, happy people so to speak.

Every year they celebrated the harvest with a great party to which they invited the people of the nearby towns to show how abundant and great they were. The festival consisted of a large feast with food to feed the entire region. At the long tables, they could see and taste the most delicious dishes prepared by hand by the locals and they drank wine also produced by their vines. The locals, although they were educated not to despise the invitation, they did not feel very comfortable with so much abundance and gluttony since they did not have that in their villages, and they could not give their children who were more than congratulatory with all the delicacies that they used to eat there. To be more precise, they looked sad, weak because they worked hard on their lands, but they were not as fertile as these.

As I said, the party was all a show of abundance and happiness and closed with a great dance where foreigners mingled with locals and, for just that night, it seemed that they all belonged to the same place. At the end of the party, a meal was always given to each family that came from outside as a sign of cordiality and that they were not selfish with their wealth, but also to show them that they had enough, and they did not eat the leftovers because their refrigerators and cupboards were overflowing with food. Until one day…

On a morning like any other in early autumn, waiting for the rainy season so that their plantings and fruit trees would green and bear fruit, the inhabitants of Sublime Garden found that the rains were not coming, and their plantations needed water. They also noticed that the flowers were wilted for the same reason and that the bees were no longer looking for pollen.

With the passing of the weeks, the scarcity became noticeable and as they always boasted of their abundance, they did not usually have a reserve-just-in-case, therefore, they began to notice sadder, and almost no one smiled. Months passed and the time for the long-awaited annual party arrived! The locals were surprised that they did not receive the invitation to go. And it is that nobody knew what was happening in the neighboring town. Or rather, they had not wanted to tell them for fear of their reaction.

Days and weeks passed, and no invitation came, and the neighbors began to whisper among themselves that perhaps, as the inhabitants of Sublime Garden had such a big ego and always boasted to their noses of their abundance and good fortune, this year. They had preferred to accumulate even more and enjoy it for themselves.

One of the town's characters began to speculate about it and, as often happens with the masses when they are “fired”, the town was fired up and decided to march towards the town in question to face them and ask them why they did that, and they despised them in such away. way. So, one morning they set out for the Sublime Garden. They were angry and full of questions and reproaches for doing, nothing and no one was going to stop them in their efforts. When there were a few kilometers to go, they noticed with surprise that the chimneys of the houses did not smoke (they were always lit while baking a cake or roasting a chicken or pork. It looked dry, yellow and no insects or birds flew over them. As they advanced, the depression became more noticeable, there were no longer flowers, butterflies, or bees in the gardens, the fruit trees had produced tiny fruits that had fallen. unripe and were inedible due to their bitter taste. In the corrals you could see the emaciated and weak animals and, in the distance, on the hill, you could see the smoke coming out of a mound of animals that surely would have gotten sick and died and for the only thing that they were used to transmit pests.

The main square, the town's meeting center, was deserted and what most caught their attention was to see that the church door was closed since it always remained open to receiving those who came to pray at all hours.

The visitors did not leave their amazement, nobody said a word since their looks said it all. Nobody understood what had happened there for such a beautiful town with such fertile lands to end up in such deplorable conditions. Some of them dared to look out the windows of the houses that had their shutters open and they could see that the inhabitants were in their beds, and they looked very weak and sick. Faced with this terrible scenario and out of respect for the locals, they decided not to advance in their task of claiming for not inviting them to the party since the reason was more than evident! So, they quietly withdrew to their villages.

What would have happened in Sublime Garden? That was the question that everyone, even their own inhabitants, asked themselves over and over again.

The day after their frustrating visit, the locals decided to hold a meeting in the square of one of the neighboring towns to Sublime Garden and undertake what they would call the "rescue plan." And it is that, far from being happy for the misfortune of their neighbors, they felt compassion for them since they understood that what they needed was humility and empathy with the surrounding towns and that is why, perhaps, they had received such punishment in a way teaching that they should be less ambitious and ostentatious with their natural riches.

The plan included that each inhabitant of the nearby towns collaborated with what they knew best to do. This is how the one who had hives transferred some of them to Sublime Garden, the gardener planted grass and put seedlings with flowers so that the bees could begin their pollination process. The ranchers brought food and water from their mills to the few remaining animals and fed them and gave them clean, freshwater to drink. Others were in charge of spraying the fruit trees so that in the next season they would bear juicy and tasty fruits. Meanwhile, the baker baked extra bread and the most industrious women prepared rich but simple delicacies from recipes that they had inherited from their grandmothers to prepare in times of famine or scarcity. Everything was simple but it is prepared with a lot of love so very happy, and this time with a beautiful smile on their faces and, some even singing or whistling under their breath, they went to the neighboring town but this time not to claim but to rescue them. and encourage them to leave their homes.

They arrived and everything continued as the last time. The church closed, the shutters of the windows of the houses mostly also closed, all very lonely and sad. The neighbors looked at each other and with a gesture of let's go! They began to knock on the doors of the houses to make their inhabitants come out. The locals confused and to a point somewhat frightened by whoever might be knocking on their doors like this, some, the boldest, just poked their noses out of the glass of their windows and were surprised to see that it was their neighbors and that they were loaded with baskets, boxes, sacks and jugs of milk.

Little by little, very timidly they were leaving their houses and approaching the friendly and energetic visitors. The first thing they did was ask what had happened to them to end up in those conditions to which they did not have a very clear answer, simply, given the non-arrival of the rains and the achievement of events that this entails, they were consuming what little they had left as they did not have a reservation because they never thought they would go hungry and shortage.

A little ashamed for their behavior in times of abundance, they were accepting what the neighbors offered them with kindness and a smile on their faces (fresh fruit and vegetables, milk, pure water from the mill, honey, cakes, and bread, etc.) So ashamed were they that they could barely look into their eyes for fear that they would brag about their situation and now think who is better? But this did not happen because that day, their neighbors, whom they treated as unfortunate people, showed them humility and gratitude precisely for those leftovers that they gave them at the end of the festivities, which was rather a sign of superiority and opulence on the part of the people. local. That day, the sublime garden people learned a great injury and that is that you have to be humble and grateful for what you have without bragging about it and also share with a feeling of empathy and not self-centeredness as they did.

A few weeks passed and finally, the long-awaited rain arrived and after a few months, little by little everything was returning to normal. The animals looked healthy and had even had young, the chickens laid eggs in abundance again, the fruit trees were full of exquisite fruits and the beautiful flowers had returned thanks to the bees that had brought their pollen there. Again everything was happiness and beauty in the Sublime Garden town but now the town shared its riches with the neighboring towns in gratitude for their rescue.