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 health of our environment from this type of farming.
Yet I also wonder if we pay the price in how we think about harvesting in its broader sense, in our work and lives.
Because our fruitfulness is almost always much more entangled than we assume, its harvesting needs to be treated with tenderness and respect.
And perhaps we have a far too narrow and individualistic view of what we produce anyway. So we fail to see all that is there in its interdependent and entangled fecundity.
This is our gift to each other. To look beyond the challenge of our entangled lives and see our true fruitfulness.
Sawubona – I see you.