Kneeling On Apples

Beyond 'too much' and 'not enough'

WIP of one of the final drawings for my book, in silverpoint, charcoal and chalk, last week.

New England travelogue part 1

We are visiting

Adam Wilson

, a couple of years online, now in-the-flesh, friend. Our host picked us up and drove us home with a bagful of homemade pumpkin soup and meatloaf sandwiches so good in one fell swoop it undid the day of airline and airport food we’d put ourselves through. My phone has decided not to work in USA and wifi is a walk up the road in the rain, so the joys of impromptu digital detox are real for us. This comes to you via the kind loan of a room at a local creamery, in the neighbourhood of Sand River Farm, where we look up from our screens and see beautiful Jersey cows cross the road to be milked just below where we are sitting.

Maizey Corn Dog aka Pumpkin Pie aka Leibling Blutwurst (Dear Little Blood Sausage)

From Thursday we’ll be in Vermont and for better or worse, in constant connection to wifi. So for now, a few pictures from the week so far. Then later in the week, I’ll write more and share more of a time of transformation over here.

I fell in love for the first time ever with a dog. Maizey bounded up and bang, all my five decades long ‘cat person’ reserve dissolved. She is abundant joy on four legs. Hurray for being bowled over.

A dusk canoe and swim in Sand River

Yesterday was spent half a world away but in absolutely familiar territory, on my knees amongst hundreds of fallen apples, gleaning. A neighbour says take all you can, so we do, and make bright pink apple sauce. In a few minutes, when we get back to the farm, we’ll chop the rest up for slow baking in the wood oven.

Prayer is indeed sometimes on our knees. For me, it is almost always gathering windfalls, finding fungi, choosing chestnuts, digging handfuls of bright earths. Crouched down low, the life of my spirit is most raised up.

Barely a twentieth of the pumpkin harvest, now curing in the warm of a long kitchen

Staying with Adam, and in the joy of meeting

K. Annie B.

, visiting their friends for a housewarming, and being fed delicious farm food at every meal, we are constantly thrown back on the learned sense of unworthiness of all this beauty and bounty, that modernity has ‘gifted’ us.

Every few hours I remind myself that everything I have is an unearned blessing. The sunlight that ripened my salad to the worms’ work that turned the soil below it.

This week I have given up parts of my scarcity mindset I didn’t know I was still clinging to, behind my own back somehow.

The road ahead is transformed.