Arriving at the farm one afternoon midsummer I asked L.T. what constitutes "ripe." Is it a philosophical question, I wondered, or a horticultural one? I understood that a plant's ripeness is not defined by my appetite -- that just because I am hungry for that pepper doesn't make it ripe -- but suddenly I realized I had no better criteria by which to assess it. In one sense, the question was prompted by the jalapenos dangling beneath the leaves on our back deck that I was hesitant to pick, but looking around us, just then, at the rows and rows of various vegetables L.T. and his family were growing, my interest was also more general. "What is ripe," I asked him, "and how do you know when something is?"
He offered initially a technical answer -- regarding the maturity of the seeds inside the fruit and their readiness to reproduce -- but he knew neither of us would be satisfied leaving it at that. Besides, he laughingly acknowledged, you can't very well assess the seeds without picking and eviscerating the fruit. And so this wise physician-turned-farmer from Guyana pointed at a bank of plants and urged a more intuitive observation. Notice, he invited me, how the branches and leaves veil the growing fruit. The plant, he suggested, is trying to hide the fruit -- because it is not ready. But when its readiness arrives -- when the fruit, whose purpose it is to reproduce, is ready to fulfill its destiny -- then the plant will take itself out of the way, essentially advertising the fruit. "It is, after all, in the plant's interest for you to notice the ripened and ready fruit and pick it, and so the plant puts it on full display." I, of course, and the birds and the squirrels and the deer and anything else that may consume the fruit and distribute the seeds to continue the natural cycle. In essence, when the fruit is ready the plant will tell you. You simply have to pay attention.
I've thought of that wisdom countless times since that plantside catechism; how it reminded me of scripture's differentiation in the Greek between "Chronos" -- clock and calendar time -- and "Kairos" -- the right time or God's time, and how you count the former and discern the latter. In the former you simply look at your watch and check off the minutes, while in the latter you have to patiently and expectantly pay attention. And I have thought about how difficult is this latter skill in a culture like ours where certitude has grown morbidly obese and curiosity has withered to wraith-like proportions. As long as we bluster and stomp around with the heaviness of what we know we will never manage the subtler sagacity of perceiving what might be.
And wouldn't that be a loss? In one of his Letters to a Spiritual Seeker written in 1850, Henry David Thoreau confessed, "I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is. I shall be sorry to remember that I was there, but noticed nothing remarkable, ---not so much as a prince in disguise; lived in the golden age a hired man; visited Olympus even, but fell asleep after dinner, and did not hear the conversation of the gods. I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries."
It wouldn't be a bad way, then, of spending my birthday today: waking up, listening with curiosity, and watching to see what's getting ripe.
He offered initially a technical answer -- regarding the maturity of the seeds inside the fruit and their readiness to reproduce -- but he knew neither of us would be satisfied leaving it at that. Besides, he laughingly acknowledged, you can't very well assess the seeds without picking and eviscerating the fruit. And so this wise physician-turned-farmer from Guyana pointed at a bank of plants and urged a more intuitive observation. Notice, he invited me, how the branches and leaves veil the growing fruit. The plant, he suggested, is trying to hide the fruit -- because it is not ready. But when its readiness arrives -- when the fruit, whose purpose it is to reproduce, is ready to fulfill its destiny -- then the plant will take itself out of the way, essentially advertising the fruit. "It is, after all, in the plant's interest for you to notice the ripened and ready fruit and pick it, and so the plant puts it on full display." I, of course, and the birds and the squirrels and the deer and anything else that may consume the fruit and distribute the seeds to continue the natural cycle. In essence, when the fruit is ready the plant will tell you. You simply have to pay attention.
I've thought of that wisdom countless times since that plantside catechism; how it reminded me of scripture's differentiation in the Greek between "Chronos" -- clock and calendar time -- and "Kairos" -- the right time or God's time, and how you count the former and discern the latter. In the former you simply look at your watch and check off the minutes, while in the latter you have to patiently and expectantly pay attention. And I have thought about how difficult is this latter skill in a culture like ours where certitude has grown morbidly obese and curiosity has withered to wraith-like proportions. As long as we bluster and stomp around with the heaviness of what we know we will never manage the subtler sagacity of perceiving what might be.
And wouldn't that be a loss? In one of his Letters to a Spiritual Seeker written in 1850, Henry David Thoreau confessed, "I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is. I shall be sorry to remember that I was there, but noticed nothing remarkable, ---not so much as a prince in disguise; lived in the golden age a hired man; visited Olympus even, but fell asleep after dinner, and did not hear the conversation of the gods. I lived in Judea eighteen hundred years ago, but I never knew that there was such a one as Christ among my contemporaries."
It wouldn't be a bad way, then, of spending my birthday today: waking up, listening with curiosity, and watching to see what's getting ripe.
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