The Bird of Paradise, the Parsley and the Idiot

Piut is one man literary delight run by a single dear person. His name is Dr. Dror Green, and he is a psychotherapist and a writer. Eleven years ago Dror established a poetry weekly magazine of one page, called Piut. In the beginning, he sent his subscribers a poetry page per week. Nowadays he mails us a poem each week.
This evening I got the 543 issue, with a beautiful text in poetic prose, written by the Hebrew writer I adore, Yoel Hoffmann. Here it is, in Hebrew. It is a short text about The Bird of Paradise, and, according to Dror’s interpretation of it, its nihilist nature, as depicted by Yoel Hofman. Hebrew readers can read the text and Dror’s interpretation here. English readers can read about Dror here, and about Yoel here.

I titled this post “The Bird of Paradise, the parsley, and the Idiot.” But what does parsley have to do with a bird of paradise and where is the idiot? Well, I must admit that the idiot is me.
As you know, a year ago I left Tel Aviv to the Galilee and moved from the busy life of the city to the peaceful life in a small community to a mountain in the north of Israel. During this year I worked daily to set up a beautiful flourishing vegetable garden. I sowed many seeds and saw them sprouting. I had only one disappointment – I sowed a lot of carrots. It sprouted, grew beautiful green leaves, but no currots.
I mailed questions to gardening forums, asked should I uproot the carrots and re-sow new seeds. And until this very morning, I kept looking after carrots in my vegetable garden, but in vain.
Today I read some articles about collecting wild plants and using them for medical purposes and for cooking. I have recently traced many sprouts of Milk Thistle and wanted to know I can I use it.
I ran into an essay that was written by Eliran De-Mayo, my neighbor in Tuval. He wrote that most of the people don’t know how to use plants, such as currot. For example, he said, the מutritional value of the carrot’s leaves is higher than its fruit.
Happy, I have decided to go out to my garden and taste the leaves. If it will taste good, I said to myself, I will cut them to my daily salad.
I took some leaves into my mouth and chewed it.
It tasted like parsley.
This can not be true, I said to myself and took a leave from another plant.
It was parsley as well.
I grew a forest of parsley plants and waited in vain for them to become carrots.
An idiot, did I say that?

My comfort is that I can use this huge amount of parsley plants to make myself a good quantity of green potion. And I do have another bag of carrot seeds to sow. This is the season for that, and I will.

Becoming a farmer is not so easy as I thought. But such mistakes are worthwhile, thank God.

Have a nice weekend,
Ilan.