Harvesting

The weather has been turning prematurely autumnal, though the season is still officially late summer. It's harvest time, and a glorious time for anyone with an allotment or veggie patch to enjoy the ripening fruit and vegetables they've been nurturing all year. Friends have been proudly sharing photos of apples, tomatoes, beans, rhubarb... sharing tips for preserving or asking for new ways to cook courgettes. Our own haul is more modest, though still plentiful, thanks to the large blackberry bush in our garden. We've been eating and freezing berries for some weeks now, and, with plenty left over, the other evening I started this year's blackberry liqueur. It is a quietly satisfying process, in which summer's fruits will age and infuse and sweeten over three or more months, in anticipation of being enjoyed during winter's harshness and well into spring. 

A different sort of harvesting has also been taking place in some of our communities, with several moves - including the creation of a brand-new community. There is a practical harvesting with each move: a sifting and a winnowing - sorting, binning, shredding, trips to charity shops; decisions and reminders of our ideals and desire to live simply and travel lightly. And there is an inner harvesting, too: a gathering up of memories, joys and regrets, as we bid farewell to much-loved people and places; as we look back at what has been, before moving on to what will be. 

RSCJ are not the only ones on the move, of course; nor are we the only ones whose lives are changed as we wave people off or welcome new arrivals. And so, as we sift and sort, harvest, preserve and enjoy our labour's fruits, I offer the words with which the latest series of Call The Midwife ended. However you're harvesting right now, whether life is changing or continuing undisturbed, there's something in here which can speak to each of us...

We can choose where we live, and where we hope to flourish. We can choose to be good, to be brave, to endure, but not the place to which our hearts run, nor what our souls may find along the way. Love is its own force, the fruit that we give and we receive; it is the crop that seeds itself and waters its own shoots. Love is our harvest; let us fill our barns with it. There will never be enough love; and there cannot be too much.

Wherever we may be, wherever we may be going, whoever we might be welcoming into our midst, let love be our harvest, filling our barns to overflowing.