What’s in a harvest?
Harvest: noun the gathering in of ripened crops.
Before crops can ripen, seeds must be sown,
or clones cut from mothers. Even before this: the soil is prepared.
We maintain, we water, protect from pests and disease.
We wait.
We wait.
We wait.
We harvest our ripened crops.
Reap: verb cutting using a scythe or sickle.
In a scene from The House That Jack Built (2018)
the field breathes with the rhythmic slice, slice, slicing of men with sickles,
harvesting.
In much the same way, ideas can also be harvested. So can stories and poems.
Finally (you might think) we arrive at the core of my introduction:
I’m completely obsessed with the idea of intellectual harvesting: preparing the soil by reading far and wide and relentlessly observing the world, watering… waiting… thinking… and finally harvesting by writing.
My point is that I am a reader, observer, writer, poet, philosopher
and above all, a harvester of stories and ideas.
I hope to bring value to this hive by sharing my interests with like-minded people like you.
I leave you with two small impressions so you have an idea of what’s to come…
deltas
Rivers rush over land, hit
oceans or deserts, birth rich soil
in the flickering forks of a delta.
Your own branching windpipe resembles
the Nile, Okavango, Orange.
The trachea keeps cleaving, becomes alveoli.
Fungi tunnels through mountain and stone,
often blossoms in fairy rings. Fresh mycelium
reaches out, covers new ground.
Someday, on a rainy day,
it will grow into my veins
and through my navel. Drenched
and dressed in fungi I will rise again:
a pinhead pops out of the ground,
grows a stem, a cap and a veil
that breaks.
to reason like mycelium
with "Primordial Chaos, No. 16" by Hilma af Klint, 1906‒1907
to reason like mycelium
means reaching far and wide ‒
never anchoring, always expanding,
branching off in unforeseen directions
chanting yes, and, yes, and, yes.
Hilma af Klint, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
