By
Abira Pathak
MSc Anthropology and Professional Practice
I spent around a month volunteering on a farm in South West England, while living in a caravan parked in their orchard of a dozen apple and plum trees. I wrote this poem as a form of journalling my observations of harvesting the fruit, working with the excess and the unready and the logics related to such processes. It is an attempt to record the embodied wisdom of people who grow food. I’m deeply grateful for my hosts to allow me this opportunity to experience living in an orchard and to be reminded that it takes a lot to collect what nature gives us abundantly.
Abundance
Smells like fruit rot
Sounds like buzzing bees
Feels like a endless cycle of chores
But only when it gives, you are full
If you have peace, it’s almost divine
If you don’t have peace, it’s truly divine
Hiding in plain sight
To give is to get
Yet to give it takes a lot
Giving can be a solely selfish act performed with a heavy intention to get
Yet the value of giving stays
We can evaluate intentions separately,
Unclustered from each other
To prevent the rot from spreading
Do grade the intentions
From best to worst or vice versa
Not wasting anything
Compote for the mushy ones
Lunch with the taut ones
When you’ve harvested abundance
Intentions can be well put to all kinds of use
Focus on the outcomes
The actions
The actions, and the actions alone can put abundance to full fruition
Only if we let them though
Can we let them?
Can we move with the abundance?
Take it all in and understand abundance?
Would it require smelling like rotten fruit?
Sounding like a buzzing bee?
Feel like a endless cycle of chores?
Photography by the author.
This piece is a kind of postscript towards Temporalities, the theme of our 2026 print issue, which you can read here.
