Lessons From A Different Way of Knowing

We drop a seed into the ground,
A tiny, shapeless thing, shrivelled and dry,
And, in the fulness of its time, is seen
A form of peerless beauty, robed and crowned
Beyond the pride of any earthly queen,
Instinct with loveliness, and sweet and rare,
The perfect emblem of its Maker's care.
——-John Oxenham

Time, I have always known, is constantly moving.  I once knew this primarily on the surface of my skin by winter’s cold and summer’s heat, and by the shifting wardrobe that responded to those changes.  I knew it, too, I suppose by the eruption of color in spring and the turning of leaves in autumn.  But the farmstead teaches a different way of knowing — a slower, more careful reading.  I know, for example, that summer is incrementally ebbing because I now close and secure the chicken coops at night a full 45-minutes earlier than I did a scant few weeks ago, and release the hens a full 30-minutes later in the morning.  I know it because, though weeding remains an unfinished claim in the garden, the more clamorous demand is harvest — the eager, jumping up and down, hand-waiving attention-claiming of reddening tomatoes, blimping zucchinis and stretching okras begging to be picked.   Which confirms a deeper lesson than the mere change of season.

Gratification delayed is not gratification denied.

As the poet reminds me in those scraps of verse at the top, what now seems like eons ago we carefully, methodically dropped those tiny seeds — “shriveled and dry” — not literally in the ground but into carefully prepared soil blocks and nestled them in the greenhouse.  There, warmed and protected from the lingering winter and consistently sprinkled with stored rain water, they swelled and stirred and sprouted.  Eventually we transplanted the seedlings into the garden where they continued to grow.  And now...

“in the fulness of its time, is seen
A form of peerless beauty, robed and crowned
Beyond the pride of any earthly queen...”

In the fullness of its time.
When it is ripe.
When that gratification can finally be indulged.
Today, because yesterday was too soon and tomorrow will be too late.


And the truth is that it wasn’t that long after all.

I’ve come to value these twin knowings — both the incremental tick and the broader sweep of time — that at once grounds me in the pregnant nuance of the moment and orients me with the season’s larger perspective.

Time is, indeed, moving.  The days are getting shorter, which feels like foreboding loss.  Meanwhile the garden, shouldering responsibility for what Parker Palmer describes as “the promissory notes of autumn and winter and spring,” is paying off its debts.  Lugging into the kitchen the heavy harvest crates, wondering what we will possibly do with all this bounty, it is indeed hard to remember, as Palmer confesses, “that we had ever doubted the natural process, had ever ceded death the last word, had ever lost faith in the powers of new life.”

Rooted, then, in this different — closer — way of knowing, I step into this day to harvest whatever may be ripe, and to use fully and productively, with the chickens, however much daylight it offers; trusting, as they have taught me, that there is always, somewhere, a patch of shade in the heat of the afternoon.