The Plant

The mysterious plant at the end of the book of Jonah touches him literally—literarily. It connects to the fragile, fleeting nature of his own existence.  The plant is Jonah’s fragile ego growing above his head—this plant he cares so much about.  A distinction is being drawn between caring for this fragile I and true caring.  My furious mental labor over the lava lamp, ameboid outgrowth of Me requires that I encapsulate and float away from my world and think about what I observe.  It is a separate, alone, thinking kind of effort—a brooding, straining, selfish kind of caring.  True caring—true effort and labor in God’s cosmos— is a connection; an intertwining of two broken things: my life and my world. 
But all I want to do is sit and look at the world—at that great city of Nineveh—as an outside “objective” observer, and not burn while I do it. Yet there I sit in frustration and anger.  My head burning.  My flimsy, little structure can’t keep up with the heat and the sun.  My own mental effort, my own thoughts even burn at the loss of the little relief I have for a moment—that little shade--at the “wrongness” of its leaving—at the exigency of the plant which was there when I woke up and disappeared while I slept.