Kapok

I was walking down to the sea on a new path one day, and found tens of big seed pods with a kind of cotton inside them. They had fallen off the tall old tree from the stormy winds the night before and were now strewn on the road. Something about them grabbed my curiosity. What is this and what do you do with it? I suddenly remembered that a year ago I had walked down a different path and was surprised to see big cotton swabs hanging from a tree. I had picked one of them and tried spinning it with my fingers into thread but it tore easily. Now I realized that what I was looking at were those same cotton pods but that they had not burst open up into cotton swabs. I could not just walk by and leave them all there, like orphans. God created this for some reason and I was out to discover it. It just seemed sacrilegious to leave them all lying there with no more potential. So I collected them all and brought them back home.

I asked the locals what it is and what you do with it. They said it is called Kapok and that the Balinese used to make pillows and mattresses from it. I tried searching on the internet about its' qualities and how it is milled, but couldn't find any answers. What interested me was touching the soft cotton inside. Some of the pods were cracked and the cotton began to peek out. I assumed that each of them would eventually open up and become the big soft cotton swabs I had seen previously. But as the days passed they just stayed a pod.

I decided to force them open. As I began to crack them, it was like letting the genie out of the lantern! The cotton was so happy it began to burst forth, and looked like kernels of corn on a cob. I began the slow work of removing all of the tens of round black seeds that resembled sweet pea seeds, from the kernels. I then tugged at each kernel to allow the cotton to open up. It was laborious, but I just couldn't let them not become what they had been created to be. The kids began to help me slowly slowly pulling the cotton hairs to their extreme.

A few days later, once the rain had stopped and the road was sunny and dry, I again passed by the tree, and all the smashed pods that the motorbikes had driven over, were now puffy cotton swabs, and no one was sitting there opening up each kernel either! That was a great discovery.The sun itself would open up the cotton kernels. So now we entered phase two; on sunny days, opening up the pods and allowing the cotton to burst forth. But we still had all those seeds to take out, which the kids and I continued to do. Excitement was in the air, and each day they wanted to go and collect more and more pods. So what started off as tens now reached the hundred mark and there were bucketfuls and bagfuls in all different stages of openness that needed to be put out in the sun each day and brought in again when the monsoon rains suddenly would come pouring down.

Everyone wanted to know what I was going to do with all of this. I had no idea. All I knew was that I couldn't let it go to waste and that I loved touching the soft fiber and marveling at the miracle of nature that created such a thing for us to use. We tried making paper from it, beating the fibers with stones and mixing it with water and putting it on a piece of guaze on  badminton rackets as our makeshift screen., But once it dried it was just cotton and not beautiful Japanese paper, as I had hoped it would be. Someone else suggested that the seeds could be used to make a dye, so we began collecting them too. Some of them rolled off into the rain and to my delight had sprouted the following morning from the rain. I joyfully showed the kids how sprouts are grown. What I didn't realize was that each of those sprouts would soon turn into a plant and then a tree! Only when my friend commented on all of the kapok tree plants that are in the garden where we were sitting the week before did I realize what was happening. I apologized for scattering the seeds all over the garden unintentionally as we worked, but he just laughed and said he will weed it all one day soon, no problem.

The inventions and discoveries continued from week to week. Each time there were a few rainy  days we would take out the big bags of cotton in different stages and begin to mill it on the porch as a rainy day activity. Our faces and clothes and hair and house were filled with wisps of it, but we were having fun. Each time someone would invent a new way of improving the process. One of the inventions was to put the cotton swabs on a badminton racket and shake it so the seeds would fall through the net instead of having to pull each one out. That soon turned into an actual milling process of rubbing the net with a broken piece of pottery while it pressed down on a pile of cotton with seeds, and amazingly enough, huge billows of cotton began to burst forth from the net, allowing the full blossoming of each kernel in an instant, while the seeds were left behind.

I kept trying to figure out how we could use the natural process of nature to do the work instead of us. I was sure that was how it was meant to be. So I started putting the cotton swabs in the midday sun and sure enough, after an hour or so the top layers of cotton were so soft and billowing, without any extra work on our part. Now we had big billows, but still with bits and pieces of seeds and debris in it. After inventing a new way of not being totally covered with the wisps of cotton while removing the seeds, I found peace and pleasure in the slow process of taking each seed out. Just the contrast of the soft wisps of cotton where a black seed was secretly hiding gave me great pleasure. Mushing my hands in a bag of cotton that seemed clean of debris and seeds, only to discover there were many still inside, I tried to figure out the meaning of it all. Why did God put these black seeds in each kernel of cotton? And only by going through again and again, very thoroughly could I discover the "needles in the haystack" and remove each one. As I did so, I observed that the actual act of pulling the seed out of the kernel of cotton was what pulled the cotton to open up! If that seed was not there and connected to the wisps of fiber, then there would be no incentive to pull at each and every kernel.

It made me realize how in everything that happens to me in life, that might seem a little "black" and "hard" (like the seeds) the full potential of that "life lesson" is in removing the "seed" which in turn allows the full blossoming of the lesson. I just thought I was removing the seeds from the cotton, I didn't realize at first that by doing so I was actually opening up the cotton to its' greatest potential.

The next stage is to fill a big pillow with the cotton, that will have all the vibrations and good energy of our hard work and will hopefully be a comfort to whoever rests on it…and a nice memory of our discoveries.