“Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear.”  *

As we walked back from our last jaunt through Sevilla, Spain on the final day in this wondrous city, I noticed a fallen orange on the ground beneath one of the several thousands of orange trees ubiquitously present to the eyes everywhere in this magical place.  The orange trees line the streets of Seville and the branches of these trees are heavily laden with their fruit.  The Seville oranges are quite large and attract the eyes’ natural magnetism to beauty.  The deep vibrant and glowing orange color of the fruit’s skin is stunningly contrasted against the determined dark shade of green in the leaves of the tree in which the fruit nests.  The tree trunks are strong that bear the weight of this sun-kissed delight.

And in these early days of April, there is another sense that is sharply awakened by the orange trees of Seville in Spain.  From the moment we walked out of the train station just three days ago, we encountered this wonderful and mysterious fruit tree, not with our vision, but rather with our olfactory senses.  The intense fragrance of the spring blossoms (azahar) of these trees engaged our noses with a bracing yet sweet abrazo.  

As we strolled through the city, over these past three brief yet timeless days, discovering the wondrous traditions of Semana Santa (Holy Week), we delightfully found unsurprisingly that the restaurants and bars almost without exception served fresh orange juice.  We made a point of availing ourselves of this delectable tastebud treat as often as possible, reviling in the comfortable notion that we were imbibing the sweet orange nectar of the magnificent fruit that constantly dangled above our jostling heads as we strolled the streets – our arms relentlessly tempted to give the trees a violent shake so as to release these sunny delight treasures.  

As we acquainted ourselves with the stories of the city through its locals and some google searching, we were surprised to find that the sweet juice that we were enjoying in the Sevilla restaurants was not related directly to the visual and olfactory sweetness of the orange trees lining the streets of Seville.  We learned that paradoxically the taste of the beautiful fruit of these lovely trees perfumed with such fragrant blossoms is in fact quite bitter and sour.  Although its  juice is not directly encountered as sweet, the fruit is used to create tasty marmalade and the intensely fragranced blossoms  are transmuted into supple  perfumes. 

How can such a beautiful shining fruit have such a bitter taste?  And how can such an intoxicatingly sweet smelling blossom draw us so close to a tree that bears such a bitter fruit?  

Now, back to the fallen fruit I began to talk about earlier.  There it was, lying on browned leaves and bare soil, under a beautiful Seville orange tree.  Yet, it was not freshly fallen.  The fruit was withered, opened up, hollowed out to its origin; its innards exposed and vulnerable to all the elements.  Surrounding this opening, the orange rind, though torn open, radiated brightened brokenness.  Then, I notice in the very heart of this sour bitter orange, opened, exposed, withered and seemingly decaying in crimped leaves and raw ground, there is a point of darkness – a round almost bright blackness that sits in the center of all of this…gleaming and waiting.  Subtlety waiting for nothing.  Silently waiting in everything!  Stillness moving, imperceptible to the senses, yet experiencing Being!  Light Leaving, Darkness Shining, Sleep Waking. 

Stillness Moving…

“Rise, let us leave this place, for you are in me and I am in you; together we form only one person and we cannot be separated.” *

 * from an ancient sermon for Holy Saturday

tpt 4/8/23

Barcelona