Up here in the northern temperate lands Autumn is the main harvest season. In reality the first harvests occur as early as June or July, but even as the seasons become blurred by climate changes and mutations in farming practice, we do still associate this season with fruitfulness, with
getting the last of the crops gathered in and laid by, enjoying a season of abundance and preparing for one where the stores will be the main source of nourishment.
If all of that sounds a bit fanciful in the context of modern shopping and eating habits, I agree with you. It is not the way we live right now.
Even so, I can’t help feeling that there may be a greater return to such seasonality as the ongoing shifts continue, either as a way of endeavouring to counter them, or as a necessary response to availability and financial constraints. Be that as it may (or not), I would suggest that Autumn is a good time to consider our personal harvests. Moving from September into October feels likea good time to be asking; what am I harvesting from this year? Or what have I harvested already?
The first point of clarification, if you’re called to do this exercise for yourself, is to define what we mean by ‘harvest’. This isn’t just a log of the year: a list of what we did and / or what happened to us. It’s more about what we take from this year. How have we changed? What gifts have we been given or developed that we will invest into the next year or beyond? What bounty have we simply accepted and enjoyed. Remember that not all harvest is ‘laid by’. Much is for immediate use, or for sale, or for gifting on. So in thinking about our personal harvests, let’s think about what we have gathered to ourselves during this year, and also about how we will hold it, or use it, or have already deployed it.
We might think about how long the growing period has been before the fruition. Do not assume that our personal harvest of the year relates only to ideas or projects or relationships or careers or whatever started during the year. Think of an orchard. Most fruit trees take a few years to become established, and a few more after that before they become ‘productive’. What we harvested this year may have been seeded last year, or a decade ago. For those young people now into their first jobs or their next stages of education, their harvest of qualifications or experience will have been seeded in their early years. Anyone who has changed jobs, or careers, or started a new business – their seeding-through-to-fruition may have also taken years in pondering before leaping.
We have been conned into thinking so ‘short term’ these days. We expect our fields to produce more than one crop a year – whatever happened to seasonality or the concept of lying fallow?
Remember the concepts of cycles, seasons, and the need for fallow years when you look at what you are harvesting this year. If there are areas of your life where you think erm…well…not a lot… then consider whether that was a failed crop, because they happen too, or a fallow year.
One of my friends talks about the idea of a “winter garden” – where everything is happening under the surface. I think this is similar to a fallow year – a field left to rest for a year, to recover, to rejuvenate. In fallow fields there may be ‘cover crops’ things planted simply to hold the soil from blowing away, which in due time will simply be ploughed back in to enrich the earth.
Maybe our personal ‘cover crops’ are temporary jobs, or short-lived friendships, or current homes that we know are not ‘forever places’. Maybe they are educational courses that seem to serve no immediate purpose.
Or maybe we simply let one or two fields lie fallow, to rest. Maybe we don’t know what to seed in them just yet.
None of these are failed crops.
I would say that a failed crop is one where we have invested whatever we felt was needed in terms of time, money, energy and/or emotion, but still nothing came of it. This happens sometimes.
When it does, it is helpful to think of it as your crop having failed, rather than you having done so.
There could be any number of reasons for it. Perhaps you did make errors, of judgement or action, note them and learn from them and do it differently next time. Consider that learning your harvest.
Perhaps you didn’t. Perhaps there were circumstances that, had you known about them, you would have addressed differently – these are not errors, but knowledge gaps. The response is the same, note them, learn from them, do different next time. Consider that learning your harvest.
Perhaps you had all the relevant knowledge, made no mistakes, but external influences impacted on the growth of your ‘crop’. Just as agricultural crops are heavily dependent on the weather – we may irrigate when it is dry, but there is little we can do about storms, or too much rainfall, or heat or cold, or not enough sunlight – so in our personal ‘cropping’ we are equally dependent upon the
weather in our lives: our careers, our financial circumstances, relationships, health (our own & other people’s), political events and on and on. We can learn and we can prepare, but there is always that externality that is way beyond our ability to predict, let alone control.
If there is no harvest, it is a crop failure not a personal one. This year. Ponder what you can do to up your chances next year. Or the year after. And then let it be.
Also: remember there are always other choices. Some crops we’re just not meant to grow. There’s always the option of deciding to abandon that aspect, and do something entirely different.
Get out of sheep and plant turnips! Cut down the olive grove and plant grapevines, or apples, or let it grow to grass and acquire some goats. We have to work the land we are on, and sometimes that means letting it determine what will thrive and what is a waste of our inputs.
Basically, you are allowed to change your mind.
If you can find a moment to pause this week, have a look around the various fields of your life and give thanks for whatever you have harvested or are harvesting this year. And, who knows, maybe you will even spot a tree full of fruit or a field of ripeness that you weren’t aware of – extra abundance. Gather it all in, and be grateful.
Next time, I’ll share my own harvest from this autumn.
