Last time, I was talking about the nature of personal harvests. So in this suddenly warm-again Autumn, I'm sharing my harvest. What have I gathered in this year, what am I still gathering?
Starting with the literal harvest of food from the garden… blackberries mostly, and tomatoes which were still ripening, uncovered, out of doors until the middle of the week, when I picked all of the green ones, now ripening in my kitchen; chillies which took a while to take root but are giving a good late crop, I have lifted and potted to over-winter inside; a single peach way back in June; a couple of pears. The herb garden largely failed in the heat and the drought and my not being around to water in the early Summer, but as we move into Autumn the coriander has recovered well, and the chives and parsley seem to be thinking about it.
Less literally, I am harvesting an abundance of friendship. When our lives are up-ended and we find ourselves sad and needy and uncertain, some of our people will stand by us, and others will not. Equally, as we then heal and become whole and confident enough to step back out on our own terms, some of our people will stand by us, and others will not.
Transitions in our inner lives cause shifts in the landscape of our lives, and it helps if we understand that not everyone will want to stay on our side of the new rift valleys. They have their own paths to walk.
Friendships, I have come to realise have much in common with fruit trees. They blossom in their season and fruit in their season. Some are long-lived, others less so. Some blossom and fruit, year on year on year. Others wax and wane like the moon, full of scented flower and ample sweetness for a time, but then retreating, and yet even as we start to consider up-rooting them, they burst
forth again. Others put all of their energy into one yield and then fade back into the earth.
Do not confuse “friendships” with “friends”. This is not about the nature of individuals, but about the interaction of timelines and energies: theirs and yours, yours and mine, mine and theirs. Shifting patterns that sometimes resonate harmoniously and at others discordantly.
In my own landscape, I will own up that much of this rests with me. I am not good at friendship. I am good at loving. I am good at loyalty. I am good at trust and respect and support, but I am not great at the every-day maintenance of contact that many friendships rely upon. I am, probably, too selfish – or at least, too self-contained. It surprises me then when I have years of great harvests in this area of my life. This has been one of them. I feel abundantly blessed with my friendship harvest.
What do I mean by ‘harvesting friendship?’
Maybe it is as simple as noticing it, feeling it, relishing it, being grateful for it. Old friends and new ones and those that fall somewhere in between.
If I had to itemise my harvest it would include every time someone chose to include me in their space (writing spaces, lunch spaces, swimming spaces, beach spaces). It would include every time someone said ‘yes, I’d love to meet up’ and went out of their way to make sure we did. It would include every phone call – made or answered. It would include food brought to my table, or eaten from it. It would include every laugh, every smile exchanged. It would include every time someone held space for me when I was sad, or mad, or unpleasant to be around. And every time someone held space for me when I was excited, and joyful, and boring them to death with my simple happy life. It would include texts that are a series of emojis that I don’t really understand but trust are meant to be positive. It would include the unspoken, untouched, contact that I feel in the silent hours. It would include the trust that someone will reach out to me if they think I can help, and that they will be there if / when I reach out to them.
If any of my friends read this: you know who you are, and I know I don’t say it often enough, but I am deeply appreciative of your being in my life.
I am harvesting my library. An inveterate book-worm and word-witch, I am always gathering books – buying them, borrowing them, being gifted them - but also I decided to revisit my existing bookshelves.
I have not read everything that sits upon them, which means they haven’t all earned their place there. Others I have read again and again and will do again and again. They more than earn their place. Reading a book is a form of harvesting. We take from each bundle of pages whatever we take from them: be that entertainment, pleasure, new ideas, reinforcement (or undermining) of beliefs, comfort, catharsis…as we read, we reap. And the same books can give us different things at different times in our lives.
A while ago, I decided that I would start in the top right-hand shelf and work my way through all of those books I already own. It will be a long reaping, but so far this year, I have gathered back into my store of images all of the Dragon Rider stories of Pern, the Hogwarts chronicles, the amazing scientific extrapolation of Cixin Liu, some of the poetry that lurks in other corners, and now I am in
Burgundy with a feisty female commander called Ash. I realise that what I am really harvesting from all of these texts is a way of being, one that I might aspire to, a centredness, a surety, but also a curiosity, a bravery, and in particular a strong female (as opposed to ‘feminine’) approach to that way of living. Dragon rider. Scientist. Military commander. Maybe that is also why, in watching NCIS from the beginning, I am focussing less on Gibbs (sorry, hero character, guilty as charged) I am more closely watching Kate, Ziva, Abbie.
And I am asking how does any of that impact on a retired procurement manager who fancies
herself as a poet? Ah well, we’ll see. When the farmer brings in the corn, he does not necessarily know what it will be baked into.
Ove this last week I have been harvesting Autumn itself: the early light catching water droplets on leaves, witch hazel showing its hidden green through the dark red of its leaves, long shadows, the unexpected purpling of grass seeds weighed down by dew, the sparkling, the sound not heard since spring-time, namely that squeak of foot-tread in wet grass, the way the last star-shaped daisies hold
rain-drops, the spirals of pine cones not yet open.
There are berries and reddening leaves, even on trees that are still sending out new shoots. It is a strange autumn. A long dry summer, hard and brittle, then rain and warming that has half of nature think we are already into spring. Trees trying to fall and spring at the same time…I wonder if they are simply hedging their bets, or if they feel confused. I wonder what it is like to be a tree. This year.
For the first time in weeks I went out to ‘flow rope’ and I did so under a full moon and a sky clear after evening rain. I am enjoying 'cool' and almost looking forward to cold.
I continue to harvest the fruits of my years in work, and the years of co-creation with people who have come and gone from my life (parents, friends, teachers, lovers, colleagues, friends ). My home is a harvest of memories, and of investments, and of work – not all of it mine.
I am beginning to take the first fruits from the trial crops of simplicity and current areas of study. These fruits include feelings of calm, the absence of stress. They include small increments of cold hard cash as some of what I put back into circulation is actually sold, rather than donated. They include new recipes for wholesome food. They include the noticeable shifts in what and how I write and the people that my writing reached this year. Young trees, these, and like that one peach: first fruits.
Finally, I spoke previously about the concept of fallow years. There are areas of my life that have lain fallow, and may do so for somewhile yet. Others that have been unproductive that I’m tilling over, taking wild-crops from while I consider whether cultivation there is still possible and if so how. Every year has fallow fields, and maybe that lesson is also part of my harvest this year: the reminder to focus on what is rather than what is not.
