POWER: 31 days of 5-minute free writes
I was at a vineyard today as part of the 2021 Farm Tour, which is held annually in our region to highlight our local farmers.
I’ve been to this vineyard before, when my friends and I participated in a previous year’s tour, and I’m pretty sure I heard this same fact then.
The tour guide said that the vineyard is on the grounds of former commercial nursery.
When the vineyard took it over, it had to take certain measures because they wanted their product to be organic.
“We had to let the land lie fallow for seven years to get all of the poisons out of it before it could be certified for our organic use,” she said.
I thought then about how impatient we can all be for change. Sometimes, this impatience is warranted and necessary.
When the Deepwater Horizon well was breached in 2010, everyone scurried to clean up the spill. I recall being at St. George Island and seeing the floating clean-up buffers (I’m not sure what else to call them) that were ostensibly protecting the beaches.
In that case, it wouldn’t have made sense to say, “The impurities will dilute over a period of years — just let it go.” (That said, I’m not sure how effective the measures they took were, but this isn’t a blog about that!).
The older I get, the harder time I have with the idea that there are some things in our lives that we really can’t fix by taking some action. We really must leave them totally alone. We’ll do more damage by jumping in and reacting than we will by taking a (very) deep breath and waiting for things to work themselves out.
There is power in having the patience to let things lie fallow, so that they come out more pure and more capable of supporting growth.
