THE HOT POTATO
Serving Up a Weekly Helping of
Sustainable & Organic Gardening, Food, Health, and Community
by Adam Brockman & Aireen Joven, November 2007, #34
THIS WEEK’S DISH -
WELCOMING AUTUMN AND CHANGE: a short meditation
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
- from “Imagine” by John Lennon
ADAM’S APPLE. Adam holds an apple he picked high up in an apple tree, as he harvests several bushels of apples from the farm’s small orchard in the fall. Wisconsin, 2006.
IMAGINE A PICTURE that a child draws of their home. There might by a simple, inviting house with a chimney, and a swirl of smoke reaching up into a blue sky with a couple white puffy clouds. Surrounding the house are several lush, green trees with strong brown trunks, one with an owl’s hole and another with a heart scratched into the bark, an apple tree dotted with red balls of fruit, a couple birds, one rabbit, flowers, and a path or river. The windows of the house are decorated with drawn curtains and flower boxes bursting with pink or red flowers. In the top left corner is a bright yellow sun with long beams reaching towards the scene below. The sun is happy, and so is each member of the family in the drawing. Mom, Dad, and Child are standing next to the house waving hello. The air swirls with a bee, butterfly, or dragonfly.
It’s such a simple picture to paint on a piece of paper; all you would need is a good box of crayons, or maybe colored pencils, markers, or paints. But where in the world could it be so simple to create this scene in real life? Could I just travel to the right corner of the world, happen upon the real-life version of the child’s drawing complete with happy family and happy home, and even snap a photo for all to see?
The family. The nature, the animals, the land, and the home. The sun and the plants. The clouds and the smoke. There would be details that the child didn’t include in the drawing. Maybe a car, road, driveway, or garage. Or the neighbors’ houses. Perhaps a fence or lightpost. But could we at least capture the essence or feeling of the child’s drawing in a photograph of an actual place in time? A real family with a real home?
As we speed through our days, it feels good to pause and look at the wondrous picture of our lives at this moment in time. There’s plenty of blank canvas to draw on, and other partly worked parts of the canvas are still unfinished. When I took an Intro to Drawing course in art school, one rule was to never erase. Make your mistake work. Make it yours. Make it part of the finished drawing, somehow, however you can. Change what you didn’t like, and make it new.
In a way, the common theme shared by all the topics we write about is the element of change. Last week’s article mentioned changing your home’s lightbulbs to the energy efficient kind. We have also discussed changing one’s diet, change in the garden, changing one’s self, and change in the world. With some pocket change, a person could feed a child a meal in another country. With some small changes in our daily lifestyle, we could help others across the world, because we are all one human family and one earth family sharing this beautiful planet that is our only home.
Of course we can find the real-life version of the child’s drawing in many places all over the world. The essence of the drawing is love, peace, and harmony. As the fall harvest warms our meals with pumpkin, squash, potatoes, beets, onions, and the last of this year’s garden’s life-giving greens, we wish you a bountiful season of family, friends, feasts, and feelings of love, peace, and harmony.
Until next week, the Hot Potato is in your hands. Pass it on!
a short film about our apples,
by innocent
