A gardener once worked for a heart surgeon. The heart surgeon was an atheist. The gardener was a man of faith. They got on very well together, but often had friendly arguments about the nature of life, and faith, and the spiritual life.
One day the heart surgeon thought he had finally settled the argument when he told the gardener: “You talk about ’soul’, but let me tell you that I have cut open thousands of human hearts in the course of my career, but not once have I found a ‘soul’ inside.”
“Well,” replied the gardener, “I have to tell you that in the course of my work over all these long years in your garden, I have accidentally sliced through many buried daffodil bulbs with my spade, but I have never seen a daffodil inside them.”
Source Unknown
Quoted in Margaret Silf, One Hundred More Wisdom Stories
(Lion Hudson, 2014)
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Image: Daffodil, part of Spring garden flowers issue of four postage stamps, USA, 1993. Courtesy: National Postal Museum, USA.