The Garden

She put the stack of drawings away, determined never to look at them again, and found ways to keep herself occupied for the next month. And then, according to the law of averages, somebody else in the village got sick, and she, along with everybody else and just as helpless, had to watch from the sidelines and pray for life to prevail in the brutal battle with its reaper. When the struggle ended, she got angry, at life, at herself and at her own ignorance. But anger doesn't make learning go faster, it doesn't make one understand what one can't understand yet, and it doesn't help one perform miracles one hasn't earned. There is no point in being angry at the amount of time it takes to master skills and knowledge. It diverts focus from actually acquiring them. If you find yourself looking long and hard for information about something you really care about and you can't seem to find any references about it anywhere, that means you are the reference; you better figure it out as much as you can all by yourself, so you can be of use to the next person who is going to inquire about it.

She pulled out the plant drawings and started from the beginning, and she stopped caring how long it would take to figure out the connections between things, the logic of the whole endeavor, where the knowledge would lead her, or whether it will be something she would actually be able to use. It turns out the only way to tell the plants that heal from the plants that stain your shirt is to tell the plants that heal from the plants that stain your shirt. Everything else is extraneous detail.