Letting Go

Relentless rain has taken another beloved from us. Peach leaf curl, a pernicious fungal disease, has devastated our peach trees, and this morning, my husband chopped off all the fruit-laden branches. This afternoon, he'll pull the stumps and remove our little fruit orchard. With the peaches will go our few apple trees, which have also been wrecked by the effects of this weather, and which never bore tasty fruit.  

It's a sad day. It's a drippy, soggy, sunless, impossibly humid, rainy day, like most of the days of summer 2018. This season has taken its toll on our food gardens, and now, our fruit orchards. We don't use fungicides, pesticides or applications of any kind. When a crop is hit with a dangerous disease, we remove it. It means more losses, but our covenant is to keep the food pure.

This isn't a loss just for humans. There will be less habitat for local birds, bees, and butterflies, less fruit for chipmunks and squirrels. Everyone loses.

You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you can't anymore, you do the next best thing. You back up, but you don't give up. Since my husband and I have no long-term plans to stay at our little homestead, we won't replant our fruit orchard here. But we will create a new one at our next home, which we hope, will be in a climate that is less trying.

It's still all good, yes it is. Siddhartha Gautama summarized it like this: you can only lose what you cling to. Clinging to loss, anger, resentment, people, pleasure, possessions, and ignorance deprives us of our freedom. Letting go is transformative. It's the most important and joyful teaching of all.

Barbie xo