Two Sides of the Apple Orchard

This essay aligns with my own heart path: spirituality expressed through our relationship with Nature. Enjoy, Llyn

BY EZRA SULLIVAN
Mar 27, 2025

Reposted from Daily Good

Excerpt: I was eighteen years old, and I had a strong trust that my guiding spirit was leading me towards an unfolding biography that would integrate agriculture with spirituality. What is the relationship between humanity and nature? How do our actions affect outcome? How can outcome be measured? When can humanity reach into nature and make a medicine, and when does humanity's reach into nature make a poison? 

My relationship with growing apples began in 2011, in Tunuyan, Argentina, right at the base of the Andes Mountains. On a bitterly cold late fall day, I joined a crew of WWOOF volunteers to harvest the last of the Granny Smiths. The orchard was primarily Red Delicious, but Granny Smiths were planted every so often for pollination. The Red Delicious apples were used for pressing apple juice and fermenting vinegar, and the Granny Smith were stored in the root cellar for winter's eating. See, if you let a few good frosts fall on the Granny Smith, the green changes in places to slight pink, and the flavor expands from sour to sweet. 

I was eighteen years old, and I had a strong trust that my guiding spirit was leading me towards an unfolding biography that would integrate agriculture with spirituality. I knew immediately that this farm held keys for my future. Here I met the orchard. Here I met Maria Thun's calendar, natural building, romance, gardening, dancing, and here I met community. An agrarian community founded to host new ideas. 

But back to the apples. There were roughly twelve acres planted into apple trees. Half the orchard was 40 years old, and was kept in relatively standard organic practice. Cover crops, regular irrigation during the growing season, annual pruning to an open vase system, composted manure applications, understory mowing, occasional soil cultivation and the thinning of fruit. This was the most productive part of the apple orchard. The open vase pruning system lends itself well to three ladder position harvesting, which enabled speed of harvest. The rows and understory were neatly maintained with mowing and cultivation, enabling ease of access for the orchardists to work. In this system, the input and output were both high, and it drove a small business. The work was accomplished with volunteers and extended family, which enabled other, more spiritual, cultural projects to exist in the surrounding time. 

The Sharing Gardens 'managed orchard' 2022.

The other half of the apple orchard was roughly one hundred years old. This half was cared for in an entirely different manner, inspired by the natural farming writings of Masanobu Fukuoka. The only input into this orchard system was flood irrigation. Meaning, the trees were never pruned, no compost or other fertilizers were applied, fruit was not thinned, the soil was never disturbed and the under story was never mowed. 

The trees in the second half of the orchard, or what we can call the old orchard, were tall. All the trees were grafted onto a standard, probably seedling, rootstock. Which means that the trees could grow to their full height and were not inhibited in growth and form by the rootstock. 

Since this old orchard had been abandoned for decades before the family bought the farm, about one third of the original old trees had died back. In their places, the seedling rootstock had thrown up new trees. As you may know, every apple seed is a genetic individual. Plant every seed in an apple and you will have that many entirely unique apple cultivars! Each of these seedling trees were unique, and most were delicious. Red, green, yellow, keepers, saucers, juicers, cider apples and dessert apples. The diversity these apples brought was starkly evident amidst the panorama of the Red Delicious and scattered Granny Smith orchard. 

The understory of the old orchard was an important feature; here too, diversity was widely noted. Grass, small shrubs, vines, large swaths of herbaceous biennials claimed their territories, and so on. The insects and animal life abounded as well! Here the native bees could be found, foxes and local honey bees thronged to this rewilded patch of orchard. 

When we worked in the young orchard, tasks were clear, like the lines of the trees. Work was quick and effective. The crew dutifully felt like cogs in a well-oiled system, moving the apples to the juicing room, and there was purpose in this work. But once we experienced the old orchard, its quality engrossed us, and we knew something was missing in the young orchard. 

The entire system interacted with us in a more complex way. Harvesting was a rewilding experience, and a lesson in the cultivation of patience. Longer, heavy ladders were used, and finding their feet amidst the thick underbrush was exhausting. You could barely walk a straight line through it. One had to traverse fallen trees, ant hills, dense undergrowth and uneven ground. Many apples were lost to the underbrush; perhaps these "lost" apples were an important part of the fertility cycle of the old orchard. Accompanying the lack of thinning the fruit, harvest was strongly biennial in nature, leading to boom-and- bust years of production. In the old orchard, the apples were fewer and smaller, yet their flavors were far more interesting. This complexity held a warmth of heart, which matched our humanity in a certain way. 

Nature thrives in our less-manicured spaces...

These two different systems of management were employed for a variety of reasons. Originally, the farm family did not have enough time, energy or capital to "restore" or replant the old half of the orchard. So leaving it be was a decision made from necessity. Over time, the "old" orchard became a place of philosophical discourse. What is the relationship between humanity and nature? How do our actions affect outcome? How can outcome be measured? When can humanity reach into nature and make a medicine, and when does humanity's reach into nature make a poison? This discourse was a guiding stream in our lives during this time. It was an open question that this farm hosted, and around thirty or so volunteers every year visited to experience it.

This article is excerpted from a longer piece by Ezra Sullivan.

Ezra Sullivan has dedicated his young life to studying, living, and teaching spiritual science in the Rudolf Steiner tradition of Anthroposophy. Raised in urban Los Angeles, he sensed early on that current ways of education and life weren't calling him. Farming with local communities became a natural choice - offering him a poignant combination of the elemental, the physical, and the spiritual. After a decade of working with regenerative biodynamic agriculture and nonprofit leadership in South America and the Pacific Northwest, Ezra studied at the birthing ground of Anthroposophy in Switzerland. He now leads a young adult residency program in the Hudson Valley of New York -- with self-guided processes to allow young people to access ancient wisdom so they find "the willingness to be themselves." Ezra shares: "I don't order material existence so that I can have a spiritual life. A healthy soul knows what it needs intuitively ... Everyday life is the initiation path."

On Community: The More-Than-Human World

This poetic essay speaks to me: mind, heart, body and soul. Llyn

BY TESS JAMES

Syndicated from pod.servicespace.org, Mar 20, 2025
6 minute read

Yesterday, I saw a lizard expanding itself in death, assisted by ants. Slowly, it ceased to resemble a lizard. With their help, it was evolving into something larger than itself. I could not look away.

Someone else might have seen murder. Another, the quickness of ants. But to me, the scene felt sacred. It lingered for hours beneath a palm shrub, where dust and shadows thickened into a shifting, dancing form on the tiled floor. It was cooler there.

I was sweeping the courtyard. Each time I passed, my body seemed to change—cool air brushing my skin, an eerie silence trailing my limbs. I could almost hear a cello playing in the distance. I felt invited to a ceremony. A lizard, becoming more than its life.

Watching the lizard dissolve into something beyond itself, I thought of another kind of becoming—one I had witnessed over the course of a year. The seed of the memory is held within my friend, a collector of seeds, who roams the world with an easy gait, a lean back, and plenty of stories in her bag.

I was once an aghast gardener, watching my precious tomato plants wither despite my best efforts. She, ever the wanderer, gathers seeds from distant lands—tiny capsules of folly and wisdom alike. She once told me:

"Seed collecting teaches you how life truly works."

My tomato plants, sick from their long journey in a seed packet, struggled to belong. The soil was still foreign to them. The land, still unknown. Many didn’t survive their first or second generation. But in those moments, their purple and yellow veins sent out an invitation—a distress call.

And then they arrived. Aphids. Cutworms. Spider mites. Flea beetles. Thrips. Gastropods. Here, even African snails respond to every distress call—and there are many.

On the days the first and second-generation tomato plants surrendered, I saw them transform—slowly but surely—into moths and butterflies. I saw them spread their wings and flow—into the beak of a dancing flycatcher that waits near our home every year from September to October.

This is how it has always been for me.

People exist in the background; my foreground is the present moment. Never empty. Always a canvas—Butterflies. Dried leaves. Twigs I like to hold. Worm castings brushing my heels.A bird call.The quiet shock of meeting a Shikra.A Racket-tailed Drongo lingering as my mother eats her birthday lunch.

This is how the world arrives for me. I step into the human world through the mirror of the more-than-human world, finding ease in its familiar safety.

I can recount the hours spent climbing trees, tracing bark with my fingers. But how do I measure the moments when the earth beneath me gives way to beauty, to wonder, to tea?

How do I quantify the time I have stood as a silent sentinel, waiting for rain alongside a thousand beings who can only drink when it falls?

I wait with them simply because I enjoy their company. It is the most natural companionship I know.

Before I loved flowers, I loved stones.

I have my preferences here too. Fire speaks to me in a hungry growl, sometimes singeing from beyond a flame. But I have always belonged to Earth. To Sky. To Water. Fire has taken its time to become a friend.

In the more-than-human world, I breathe better. Wind curling through the ribs, lung tissue encircling the pain where my bones held tightness. A tremor in my chest. A quiet sigh before I knew I needed one. Attention softens on the edges of my awareness, and I am breathed.

Yesterday, a dying lizard, a mango twig, and the first summer rain steadied me from a lingering question: Are we a violent species?

I found my answer in summer.

Summer—a single word, yet never the same from one moment to the next. The terrible heat is not constant. Not across days, not across hours, not even across villages and cities. Here, our summers have moods.

The sun singes at noon. But not all noons burn the same.

Some days, like yesterday, summer carried dew. My mother and I tried to tease rain from the dew. It worked—by evening, long after we had resigned ourselves to its absence.

And so, when I look deeply, everything shifts.

My breath shifts first.

But arriving here, to this breath, took a lizard, a twig, and the memory of a mango tree that once overlooked a pond. A pond where herons pecked at water holes. Where Jaladhara skittering frogs called out for rain.

Through the more-than-human world, I find the safety to look again—at the people who matter to me.

My father steps into the courtyard. A patriarch, yet in my eyes, he is slowly dissolving into something beyond a parent—especially with the pearly white beard he has been growing for months now. No longer just the bearer of authority, but a dignified presence unfurling in quieter, more human ways.

My understanding of the human world has always been fragmented, wired through disparate notions. I recall easier times, but it is the animate world that has stood as guardian to my sanity.

In the human world, I have needed concepts.

When I couldn’t grasp their fluidity, I became starkly reductionist, shrinking my life into the smallest space possible—trying, at least, to be harmless. But even in that space, I was reminded of the potency of a mustard seed. Except I am no mustard seed. I splutter differently. I bloom differently. I race with the world—chasing centers, apexes, circles, pyramids, and such. Occasionally, my soft body arrives at its own softness, the wily muscles hanging around breath on a dancing tangle of sticks and such.

I see with clarity now.

I cannot live without notions. I cannot live without friends.

I have spent time with metaphors. Some call it mysticism. Yet nothing has been as affirming as allowing notions to dissolve and flow. For that idea to germinate, it has needed space within me.

In the foreground, the towering presence of canopies offers myriad company.

A simple offering—root vegetables cooked on coals, eaten with crushed chilies. The sharp heat of capsaicin burns my tongue—earthy, fruity, alive. I think of the parrot, unsinged by the chili’s fire, and I smile.

The women in the neighbourhood watch over those passing by, always looking out for friendlies. The three sisters, empty nesters, wave at me.

They always recall better times on this street.

"This place didn’t have all these shops. These were homes."

"See those buildings? Once, there were trees there. Monkeys lived on them. The ledges were seamless, unlike now!"

They sigh at the past and ponder the stillness that surrounds them now.

I know this about them.

They love to eat root vegetables with crushed chilies, like I do.

I see a shared glint of laughter as I wave back. Perhaps today, I will need an extended hour on the ledge that separates our properties into "ours" and "theirs."

And we shall gossip like warblers—town gossip, about root vegetables and such.

This is the secret I know of invitations.

I have always seen my belonging to the more-than-human world as a response to an invite.

A twig. A dying lizard. The first summer rain.

Everything calls, if I listen.

Yet in the human world, I have moved differently. As a disruptor. Perhaps because I never saw it as a world of invitations. With the same score in mind, I tend to even out scores, with or without knowing it.

The suffering of the rivers. The time the river coughed back plastic to the shores and flowed on, indifferent, as if nothing had happened.

But everything swells up, with room for invitations.

This is the secret I have come to dwell in.

One must understand the nature of invitations in the human world too.

And so, I post them—my invites—out into the world.

And there is laughter.

Like breath, between me and the Other, inseparable.

We are a 'kaleidoscope of butterflies!

Recently, my friend Sarah Hunter posted this image of a beautiful weaving she made. To me, it looks like a butterfly flapping its wings causing ripples of air to spread. It reminds me of that proverb: When a butterfly flaps its wings, it can lead to a great wind-storm on the other side of the world. In other words, small actions can lead to large and distant effects.

Butterflies don't exactly move in flocks or schools; they don't seem governed by herd mentality. Each one, in its own fluttering way, seems to be following unique inner guidance as it moves from flower to flower; sipping nectar, laying eggs.

 

And yet science does have a name for a group of butterflies: a swarm, flutter, rabble or, my favorite, a kaleidoscope!

 

I like to imagine myself, in concert with all my other butterfly friends, each doing our part to make this world a better place: pollinating, 'laying eggs' (planting seeds).

 

I like to imagine that our wingflaps form a kaleidoscope of blessed change that touches the world, both near and far.

 

I'm not much of a warrior. I don't have the courage and fortitude to fight against all the 'wrong' in the world. But I AM a gardener; a nurturer, an artist, a friend.

 

I need to believe that, each of us doing our part, using our own unique set of gifts and skills can help bring about a better, more healed world. A kaleidoscope of change.

And...if this post struck you as too 'woo woo' and philosophical...Here's a funny meme I found while searching for quotes about the effects of a butterfly's wingflaps. I couldn't resist - teehee.

Inter-faith To Inter-Pilgrim: Alive In The Search

 

--by Ravi Ravindra from Awakin.org

The following essay, excerpted from a longer piece speaks to my heart and soul. We are in a time of great divisions; people wanting to prove that their point of view is right and 'the other' is wrong. This piece speaks to the wholeness of spiritual truth above what our minds think/analyze; to the Unity of God/Nature out of which we spring and which we are each trying to find our way back to.

I have wished to engage in what may be called an inter-pilgrim dialogue. In my judgment, there is something wrong with interfaith dialogues. When the East-West or interfaith dialogues are too much bound by the past, the dynamic nature of cultures and religions, and above all, of human beings, cannot be appreciated. If one has never met someone from another culture or religion, interfaith or inter-cultural conversation is obviously a good idea. But I wish to suggest as strongly as I can that interfaith dialogues are at best a preliminary stage of human-to-human dialogue and can even be an impediment to a deeper understanding. 

A dialogue of cultures and worldviews, in which the parties involved declare their adherence to one or another faith or culture, can fix these faiths and cultures into the entities that they were. In fact, these cultures and religions are alive and dynamic and are undergoing large and serious transformations right now. An inter-pilgrim dialogue, which is of necessity somewhat trans-cultural, trans-religious and trans-disciplinary, is needed to move into a future of a larger comprehension. We don't need to stunt the growth or prevent a radical reformulation of the traditions by insisting that everyone declare their adherence to one or another version of the past. Every major spiritual teacher, especially the truly revolutionary ones like the Buddha and Krishna and the Christ, points out both the great call carried in the subtle core of the traditions as well as the betrayal (a word which comes from the same root as tradition) of the real living heart of the Sacred by them. To fix the other, or myself, in some past mold and thus to deny the possibility of a wholly unexpected radical transformation is surely a sin against the Holy Spirit: treating the other as an object rather than a person, an 'it' and not as a 'Thou.'

[...] The search for Love can become merely a personal wish for comfort and security, just as the search for Truth can become largely a technological manipulation of nature in the service of the military or of industry--of fear and greed. Whenever truth and love are separated from each other, the result is sentimentality or dry intellectualism in which knowledge is divorced from compassion. Partiality always carries seeds of violence and fear in it. Thus, in the name of 'our loving God' many people have been killed, and many destructive weapons have been developed by a commitment to 'pure knowledge.' But such is not the best of humanity –in science or in religion. Integrated human beings in every culture and in every age have searched for Truth and Love, insight and responsibility. Above the mind, the soul seeks the whole, and is thus able to connect with wisdom and compassion.

Let us not conclude for the Truth is in Vastness beyond all formulations and forms. In being alive in the search one is alive. Openness to the Sacred always calls for sacrifice, primarily of one's smallness, which is buttressed by an exclusive identification with a particular religion or nation or creed. A person who occupies neither this place nor that -- physically or intellectually -- may be uneasy, but this is the price of being free and in movement. The only one realization which is needed is that there is a subtle world, and that I am seen from that world. My existence now, here, is in the light of the subtler world. To realize the presence of the subtle world and to live in the light of that vision requires a continual impartial re-visiting of oneself, which in its turn requires a sacrificing of self-occupation. What is needed is the bringing of the religious mind (which is quiet, compassionate, comprehensive, and innocent) to bear on all matters. Not only to science, but also to technology, arts, government, education, and other affairs.

And the religious mind--which is the mind which is suffused with a sense of the Sacred--is cultivated in an individual soul. It is not a matter of bringing knowledge systems or abstractions, such as science and religion or theology, together. What is needed is a cultivation of a religious mind. The new paradigm is always the perennial one. It is possible to have a level of consciousness-conscience that sees the uniqueness of each being as well as their oneness with the All. This is largely a matter of metaphysical and spiritual transformation which requires an on-going sacrificing of one's smallness -- even more in the heart than in the mind. The new forms will naturally be different. Truth has no history; expressions of Truth do. The new dawn, when we will no longer be there to look at it with the usual eyes, will bring a new song and a new word. But the Essential Word shall abide, often heard in the silence between words.

Ravi Ravindra is a mystic, inspired by close connections with J. Krishnamurti and Jeanne de Salzmnann in the Gurdjieff tradition. Excerpted from here

An Amazing Synchronicity! (and a woman who's lived 'money-free' for ten years!)

 An amazing synchronicity!!!

Yesterday, I came across an article about a woman in Australia who "...quit her job and closed her bank account ten years ago. Today, she’s more committed than ever to her moneyless life".

I found her story to be so inspiring that I immediately copied the URL and switched to my email account to record it with the thought of sharing it through my network at a later time. As I opened my inbox, there was an email that had just been sent four minutes earlier (!) by a dear friend in Vermont who had also just been reading the exact same article and had copied the URL to send to ME since she thought I'd be interested. What are the odds of that happening?!

Here are a few quotes from the article to whet your appetite:

"All through history, true security has always come from living in community."

“I love being at home and I love the challenge of meeting our needs without money – it’s like a game.”

“It’s very different to bartering or trading, which involves thinking in a monetary, transactional way: I’ll give you this if you give me that. In the early days people would say, ‘Come and do this for me and I’ll give you such and such in return.’ And I’d say, ‘No, I’ll just come and do the work and you don’t have to give me anything’.”

“I actually feel more secure than I did when I was earning money,” she says, “because all through human history, true security has always come from living in community and I have time now to build that ‘social currency’. To help people out, care for sick friends or their children, help in their gardens. That’s one of the big benefits of living without money.”

 

Here is the article in full: Meet the woman who lives without money: ‘I feel more secure than when I was earning’ By Louise Southerden - The Guardian

 

And remember: "The miracle is this: The more we share, the more we have."

Guaranteed to Make you Smile! - I Look to You

Here is a beautiful, joyous, sweet song performed by Masaka Kids Afrikana. Guaranteed to make you smile!

 

the only way to live an abundant life

Here is a fantastic, short video about the connection between generosity and abundance. We couldn't say it better ourselves!