Pushing the Orchard

At their best, my writings are apples that naturally fall out of a tree because it is their time to be ripe. If I am lucky, I will catch them as they are falling. I gather them with a small basket, lightly polish them, if at all, and bring them to the table.

If I become impatient and shake the tree, several unripe, unready apples will get mixed with the good ones. Because the difference between ripe and unripe is sometimes very subtle but still significant, I must throw the whole basket away, go to another tree, and wait.

During moments of a different kind of desperation, I will pick up what has already fallen on the ground.

A right apple is a good eat, no matter what time of day. Because it is right, there’s no need to eat more than just enough. Eating more will ruin the senses.

My writing reflects my philosophy, how I see myself, how I see my place in the world, how I decide on my actions.

When forced to do so during conversations, I sometimes find myself fumbling to find the right words to label myself and my direction in life. The more I struggle to label, the more my explanations become muddled. After trying and failing, I often wind up telling the insistent party, “I’ll tell you what I did in the distant past and what I’ve done recently and what I’m doing right now, and you can decide what to call that. You can decide what to call me.”

I used to shake the orchard trees to force a false bounty. I used to think that I had absolute control over the field, so that my harvest was systematic, efficient and predictable. I used to force myself to eat unready apples.

There are people who have already determined their beginning, middle, and ending. They are resolute about who they want to be, what they want to achieve, and will stop at nothing to get there. They harvest according to a clock. Their method is to collect, sort, peel, juice, and can as many truckloads of apples as they can fit into their processing plant. This method allows unripe, ripe, and overripe apples to be mixed together and, on average, taste as if all the apples were ripe, without having to take a bite out of one. All the cans have labels and expiration dates. Often the labels and expiration dates are not accurate, but they are there, nonetheless.