Last week I had a series of revelations about creativity while harvesting the walnuts.
But every time I pass the tree, believing that I’ve already collected everything, I found myself surrounded. I shove a few in my pockets, use my tshirt as an apron, and finally –again– go get a bucket.
Wandering around and around, it was difficult to believe that I could find another, and another and another where I had just walked moments ago. Of course there was a reason. Wandering, I approached the same spots from different directions, different perspectives allowing me to see under and around leaves and tussocks of grass.
So… perspective is not just a nice thing to do. It’s actually a form of wealth.
By now my senses are heightened to identity a snatch of one particular color of brown, different from all the browns of the leaves and turning husks, a brown I can now distinguish in full sun and in the shifting shadow under the tree. The heightened capacity is so unfamiliar that it feels like intuition, but it’s just attunement.
Attention, apparently, heightens and refines our powers.
I walk the 50m2 space under the two trees. A remote place become so familiar in the last two weeks. I know the edges and the holes, the clump of tall grass, the patch of nettles and the route of the blackberry. Yet as I pass the same ground, I am continually finding riches.
The places we have already been are not empty.
Today, I did not bring a basket. The afternoon was so warm that it felt like the beginning of summer, not the end. It was a day to not let logistics distract from the sensation of this air on skin. In a few hours it will be gone.
So I welcomed disorganization. I picked up as many nuts as I could carry and placed them on a corner of the net, then circled out again. More walking than with a basket. That’s the kind of languid work the day calls for. I’m on target. i didn’t count exactly how many nuts I could manage to carry in two hands, but I realized there was a fixed limit, after which I would invariably drop some.
The extra walking was no problem, nor the full hands. The problem came when, returning to the pile with hands decidedly full, I would see another one, which happened nearly every trip. Knowing know that perspective is crucial I doubted my ability to return at the same angle to the same place.
So then, must head back before my hands are full, in preparation for receiving yet more revenue.
This realization reminded me of a rhythm I recognized in myself after 10 years of teaching. About an hour before my class I would become alarmingly sleepy. I would doubt that I could make my way to the venue, let alone stand up, talk, and dance. I came to understand that this was an inhalation, a drawing back before the wave makes landfall.