creating change without shouting
A fruitful rest? Somehow this tips on its head all our culture tries to tell us. That we earn fruitfulness, that it only comes through striving. And rest is a means to an end. But what if we’ve misunderstood the very nature of life? THE FECUND FALLOW And what if all this waiting;this trembling body … Read more
If we pick every flower, what is left for passers-by to savour? And if harvesting fields, orchards, vineyards, and woods takes everything, what about the next generation of growth? Where will it come from? Our cycles for judging fruitfulness and success have become catastrophically short-term, and the consequences are all around. We think we have … Read more
How do you pick your plums, apples, or any fruit you eat? You likely take them off the supermarket shelf, ready selected and potentially wrapped. And because most of our fruit is grown in highly engineered monoculture, picking will be a uniform, mechanically assisted process. But at what cost? There’s an obvious cost to the … Read more
These are delicious Victoria plums from my home county of Kent, the ‘Garden of England’. Their fragrant smell and juicy, sweet taste remind me of the fruit farm where I grew up. They are extraordinarily evocative. For the last few weeks, we’ve been able to buy tree-ripened plums. Yet these last few are verging on … Read more
Walking down the lane, I picked up these gorgeous plump acorns. This year they have been particularly large, and the blackberries are following their lead. Yet what makes them so big? It’s not their individual capacity for growth because fruitfulness is not a solitary action. An acorn cannot determine its own size. Instead, it’s the … Read more
None of us can produce good fruit on our own. Even when we’ve let go of the identities and ideas, the things and the memories that have previously defined us, we are still not alone. Every creative idea, each insight, whatever is healthy and lovely, is the product of some form of germination. And has … Read more