Lessons from Oriental Melon

Have you ever looked back at life and realized
you shined so bright that season?

For once in your life, you can taste the sweetness, freshness and colourfulness of what this world can offer you. Everything goes so effortlessly well and seems like all the suffering that you had to endure for years are being paid in full joy. The joy that you can touch, you can feel, eat, consume, to the extent that your hunger that once was fulfilled, now turn into insatiability.

During that small window of time, everything feels like an eternity. At the same time you become afraid of dying. What the world offers that fulfills you materially becomes the only thing you chase. A neverending race with indefinite posts. No rest.

Because the moment you rest is the moment you stop getting the rewards.

Insatiability is poison.

I remembered the time when I started getting food intolerances, or perhaps when I started realizing my food intolerances. It was when I consumed too much black pork in Jeju, more than I would normally take any food daily.

I grew intolerance towards pork, duck, and other types of fatty meat since then.

What I used to enjoy, became my poison.

As modern humans, living in a world where they play around with our scarcity mindset in order to make money, that scarcity mindset becomes ingrained in our thoughts and behaviours without us knowing. “I need to buy more than one, just in case I need it again.”, “I need to eat all my fill, just in case we can’t go back.”, “I need to save this and that for later, just in case they don’t make it again.”

Before you know it, you find yourself not wearing that extra clothing you bought, you grew intolerance, gained excessive weight, developed digestive problems. The things that you saved for later, are now expired and you can’t put them to use anymore.

“Didn’t you say this was about Oriental Melon? Why are we talking about possessions, pork and digestive problems?"

The dried up, crushed, crusty oriental melons that I saw that winter, made me think back to the sweet, fresh and edible oriental melons I had the summer prior.

I realized that oriental melons are one of the many fruits that they don’t dry up and store for winter in Korea. They leave them to dry up attached to their trees, to fulfill their own life cycle. To be enjoyed by everyone in its season and lo be left to rest so it can be fruitful in the next season.

Watching these oriental melons felt like I’m looking at myself.

What if God is telling me to rest in this season of winter because I’m not a persimmon that is picked, threaded and left to dry under the cold winter breeze?

What if God is telling me to take a careful look at the Oriental Melon tree that is left as it is for a season, to strengthen its roots, to grow and reach deeper, to find springs beneath the soil?

So that I can bear sweeter, fresher, juicier fruits in the upcoming summer.

Do I have enough faith to wait as much as I do to work?

Photographed & Written by Natasha Liwang