Hidden Harvests

 

"It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found." ~ D W Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971) ~

I have been thinking about Winnicott's words this month, particularly because August seems to me a month of promises, although not necessarily promises made to other people. They are the promises we make privately to ourselves about the lives we hope, one day, to live.

A dear friend of mine has recently decided to retire so that she can devote herself fully to the work she has always felt called towards. I admire her courage. She has always possessed an entrepreneurial spirit, and she has reached the point where working for herself seems likely to give her a deeper satisfaction than continuing to work for others.

 

What moved me most was her unwillingness to live with the question of what might have happened had she not tried.

So she decided that the time had come.

 

We celebrated her retirement together. G made the most delicious strawberry cake because strawberries are among her favourite things, and I found myself wondering what one might give a person who is not really retiring at all, but beginning again.

I eventually thought of a gift voucher and a cyanometer.

 

A cyanometer is a curious old instrument for measuring the blueness of the sky. The first was devised in 1789 by the Swiss physicist Horace Bénédict de Saussure. I liked the idea of giving her something so apparently unnecessary and yet so perfectly suited to her.

 

Blue is her favourite colour.

 

More than that, I liked the thought that the cyanometer might encourage her to look upwards. There will be days, inevitably, when the sky is obscured by cloud. But the blue has not disappeared. It is merely hidden.

There is something in that which seems to me worth remembering.

I often wonder about dreams myself. I wonder whether the life we are living is the only life available to us, or whether other possibilities continue to exist somewhere beyond our familiar boundaries.

 

What is a fulfilled life?

I have never known quite how to answer that question.

I admire my friend's courage, perhaps partly because I do not always possess it myself. I am rather fond of stability. The familiar has its consolations, and I know that I often retreat from the unknown before I have given it a proper chance.

 

What is it, I wonder, that enables one person to walk towards uncertainty while another turns instinctively towards safety?

Perhaps it is conviction.

Perhaps it is necessity.

Perhaps courage is not the absence of fear at all, but the discovery that there is something more important than fear.

 

I sometimes imagine the brave person as someone walking forward without hesitation, head held high, certain of the road ahead. 

Yet perhaps this is only how courage looks from a distance. Up close, it may look much less impressive. It may look like uncertainty, sleeplessness and second thoughts, followed nevertheless by one small step.

 

I am not sure that I want to prove anything by changing my life. There are times when I think contentment may be a more worthwhile ambition than reinvention. I do not particularly mind the path I have chosen, and I have no desire to abandon a life simply because another one might exist.

And yet life has a curious way of making us fluid.

We think we have settled, and then something changes. A friendship alters us. A place changes us. A book arrives at the right moment. Someone else takes a courageous step and, without intending to, makes us wonder about our own unopened doors.

I am full of contradictions. I have accepted this by now.

 

Perhaps that is not such a terrible thing. We are not required to remain intellectually consistent with every version of ourselves we have previously been. We are allowed to change our minds. We are allowed to want different things at different times. We are allowed to discover that the answer we gave ourselves last year was true then and is no longer quite true now.

Perhaps a life is not made coherent by having one unchanging desire, but by continuing to listen closely enough to know when something within us has altered.

My friend's decision has reminded me of this. Her courage does not tell me that I must do what she has done.

It simply reminds me that such courage exists.

 

Perhaps that knowledge is itself a kind of gift. We go through life imagining certain doors to be closed, until we see another person pass quietly through one of them. The door may not be ours to enter, but we are changed by knowing that it opens.

 

David Lloyd George — “Anything can be achieved in small, deliberate steps. But there are times you need the courage to take a great leap; you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.”

 

And perhaps the greatest courage is not in remaking ourselves entirely, but in allowing what is deepest and truest within us to emerge at last from its hiding place and step quietly into the light.

Hidden Harvests

 

T. S. Eliot called April the cruelest month. I sometimes wonder whether August might be its gentler counterpart, the most generous of the year. By now the fields are ready for harvest, the apple orchards are heavy with fruit, and the landscape seems to offer up what it has been quietly preparing since spring.

 

There are mornings when I walk to the little cliff above the sea and sit alone for an hour, watching the fields and the changing light. Nothing is required of me there. Gradually the mind loosens its grip upon its small burdens, and I begin to feel once more in tune with myself, with the landscape, and with the larger rhythm of life.

 

One such morning, sitting beside a golden barley field beneath an almost impossibly clear sky, I found myself thinking about a sentence by John Eric Adair. 

After a lifetime spent observing people and what they might become, he wrote: 

"The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there."

 

I have returned to that thought more than once.

 

We often imagine that fulfilment must come from somewhere outside ourselves, as though courage, wisdom or purpose were things waiting to be acquired. 

Yet Adair suggests something more hopeful. Perhaps the most important things are not created at all. Perhaps they are already present, waiting to be recognised.

 

The fields seem to understand this. The harvest does not suddenly appear in August. It has been gathering itself for months, hidden beneath spring rain, summer sunlight and the ordinary passage of days. 

August merely reveals what was there all along.

 

I wonder if the same might be true of the places and people who restore us. They do not put something new into us so much as awaken what has been waiting there, reminding us of capacities and graces that may have lain dormant beneath the surface of our lives. 

A good friend may not give us courage but help us remember that we possess it. A beloved landscape may not create peace within us but make it easier to hear the peace that was already there.

 

Perhaps this is why I have begun to think of August not simply as the season of harvest, but as a season of recognition. 

The earth reveals what has been gathering within it since spring, each ripened field seeming like a blessing brought at last into the light.

 

And I find myself wondering whether our own lives may hold such hidden harvests too. There may be strengths we have not yet discovered, hopes that have not yet found their season, or possibilities still unfolding beyond our sight. 

The earth is patient with such things. It does not hurry the grain towards ripeness.

 

Perhaps we should extend ourselves the same kindness.

For what appears dormant is not necessarily lost, and what remains hidden may still be gathering strength in silence, waiting patiently for its moment to emerge. 

Willie Nelson's City of New Orleans, released by Columbia Records in 1984, is one of G's favourite albums. 

He often plays it when we are driving through the countryside, and somehow Nelson's weathered voice seems to belong to the open road, the wide fields and the long unhurried miles.

There is one particular verse, written by Dave Loggins from the album that always makes me smile.

We'll move up into the mountains so far that we can't be found

And throw "I love you" echoes down the canyon

And then, lie awake at night 'til they come back around

Because the Skies Cannot Keep Their Secret

 

"The skies can't keep their secret," Emily Dickinson wrote, and I have often wondered whether she understood that certain skies seem more willing to speak than others.

 

Whenever I find myself in the city, I catch my eyes wandering upward almost against my own intention, as though expecting some revelation that never quite arrives. Yet the skies there remain strangely self-contained. 

They hang above streets and rooftops with a kind of reserve, their horizons interrupted by buildings and smoke, revealing little beyond the weather. One passes beneath them as one passes beneath ceilings, scarcely aware of their presence.

 

The sky I long for is another altogether.

 

It belongs to the coast, where nothing stands between the earth and the heavens except distance itself. There the blue seems to possess depth rather than colour, inviting thought as much as sight. 

One does not simply gaze at such a sky. One comes away from it feeling that the world has grown larger, and one's own burdens rather smaller.

 

When I left the city this evening, rain had settled over everything. 

The flags that had fluttered so proudly after the football celebrations now hung sodden along the streets, heavy with water in an air that felt curiously more like October than the beginning of summer. Even the buildings appeared to have surrendered their brightness beneath the damp.

 

I travelled south expecting to find the familiar haar waiting for me.

 

Instead, I arrived to summer.

Roses leaned over old stone walls. Periwinkles shone beside the paths. Wild orchids flowered upon the hillsides. Beyond them the fields had turned gold, and the farmers were already cutting the first hay, storing sunlight against the shorter days that must inevitably come.

 

How could one fail to recover a little here?

 

I knew before I reached home that the following morning I should carry my breakfast into the garden. It has become one of the slow rituals by which I measure the seasons. 

There is something profoundly reassuring about beginning the day beneath an open sky, while birds busy themselves with affairs infinitely older than our own, and the first warmth of sunlight settles upon the table. Such moments restore one's proportion. 

They remind us that life is built less from extraordinary events than from ordinary mornings rightly received.

 

Blaise Pascal once observed that "Man was lost and saved in a garden." He was thinking, of course, of Eden and of Gethsemane, of humanity's beginning and its redemption. Yet I have come to think the sentence reaches further than theology alone. 

There are places in which we lose ourselves almost without noticing, and there are places that patiently gather us back together again.

In the city I often feel like a passing figure in someone else's story, present but scarcely necessary, a man crossing the stage without a single line to speak. 

Yet when I return to my own garden, among growing things that ask nothing of me except time and care, I find myself returning as well. There, the hurried self I carry through the city begins to fall away. If there is any place where the heart relearns its own language, I believe it is there.

The wind carries the scent of roses and newly cut grass, and each morning begins beneath a sky that keeps no secrets from those willing to look upward. Little by little, I begin to recognise again the country of my own heart. This, I have come to believe, is what coming home truly means.

For my birthday, G prepared one of my favourite summer lunches, Frank's Asparagus and Seafood Quiche from Mary Kay Andrews' The Beach House Cookbook, filled with sweet crab meat, prawns, and tender asparagus. It was served with crisp green salads and a Moroccan chickpea salad dressed with harissa, delicious at room temperature on a warm afternoon. 

One small note for anyone who enjoys the recipe. The cookbook omits the size of the quiche tin. G always uses a 25 centimetre tin, and it has never failed to produce a wonderfully light and generous quiche.

For dessert, we brought home a beautiful strawberry tart from our local café, baked by an Italian lady whose gift for pastry is spoken of with admiration in these parts. G called it "summer on a plate," and I could think of no happier description. 

Recovery is seldom anything more mysterious than coming home to oneself. The place may help, and so may the season, but they are only gentle guides. 

At last one comes to understand that the longest journeys are often those that bring us home to the quiet country of the heart.