Cucumbers and the Ocean

and Vulnerability in Time

I bumped into Kelly Hellmuth here on Substack—no surprise there, but I was intrigued by her background (student at Duke Divinity School), poetry and the theology of several of her posts. I’m a sucker for well development theological writing. And, by ‘well developed’ I mean flavored with a healthy degree of uncertainty.

Photo by Yiyang on Unsplash

So, enjoy some of Kelly’s words and be sure and SUBSCRIBE to her page. The page is yours, Kelly.

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The Poet Compares Human Nature to the Ocean from which we Came by Mary Oliver

The sea can do craziness, it can do smooth,
it can lie down like silk breathing
or toss havoc shoreward; it can give

gifts or withhold all; it can rise, ebb, froth
like an incoming frenzy of fountains, or it can
sweet-talk entirely. As I can too,

and so, no doubt, can you, and you.

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Did you know that cucumbers have spines? I didn’t for the longest time. As the fruit grows on the vine, each little cuke pimple (that makes them so endearing as a salad addition or—even better—as pickles) grows a claw. We are so used to grabbing them from the store all smooth and waxed and…all chill…but in reality, those guys fight for their existence. I’m not a botanist or a farmer, but I am something of a contemplative, and the whys of plants intrigue me. I could do research, but at the moment, I would rather speculate.

What do you think of when you think of a cucumber? I asked my husband this question, and he answered, “Green…and crunchy.” (We had a good laugh.) At the risk of sounding wildly pretentious (as is the unfortunate nature of a contemplative and a poet), what is the essence of a cucumber? If it were a person, what kind of personality would it have? Maybe you think of the term “cool as a cucumber” which for some reason conjures up the visual image of a pickle in a leather jacket and sunglasses. Or Veggietales tunes activate deep inside your soul like some sort of evangelical sleeper agent, making cucumbers innocent and oh so silly.

For some reason, to me, cucumbers are vulnerable. While they grow, waiting to flourish to the point of usefulness, they protect themselves like some sort of vegetative hedgehog. But unlike the hedgehog, the spines…the spikes…the protective prickliness…just wipe away when the time is right.

Man. How often do we hang on to our protective prickliness long after we are ready? Conversely, how often do we let down our guard, wiping off the spines too soon and leaving all of our little pickle pimples out in the open to be picked apart by birds? Obviously the comparison is not exact, but I wonder if we can learn some wisdom from the cucumbers.

How does this all relate to Mary Oliver? I’m not sure we as people understand each other. Our ebbs and flows as people. Our waxed and polished, de-spined natures. We are at the mercy of the moon. We need sun and water and tending and pruning. “Ready” is wildly subjective by both person and situation; each of us can only properly assess this by self examination. From the outside, our job is to recognize the spines. To embrace the breathing silk or the shoreward havoc where it is in the process.

Goodness, how lovely is it that we can learn so much about what is inside ourselves and others from what surrounds us?

Blessings, friends.

—Kelly