The Older, the Elder & the Apple Tree

A few years ago, I walked through the endless fruit orchards of Kent. These were acres of apples grown to feed the world. It was an early autumn morning, full of gentle and sweet sunshine. As I walked down the lane to head into the orchard the scene was set to be glorious. And yet, like some unsuspecting journalist happening upon some unexpected carnage, the sight that I encountered froze me.

All across the orchard floor was an endless sea of fallen apples. Not just a few, as one would expect, but millions. The whole orchard, the whole of many fields, seemed to be lying on the ground at various stages of rotting. Every shade from red, green and brown, all turning to that familiar shade of copper of the mushy brown rotten apple. A haven for the wasps to glut on, but a devastation of potential.

What had happened?

Simple.

No one had come to pick the fruit.

This was pre-Brexit and so it wasn’t due to lack of workers. It was simply that they were surplus to requirement. They had grown, they had endured a dormant winter, they had survived a hardening spring, they had all blossomed like an unimaginable symphony, the flowers had turned into budding fruit, they had drawn up endless resource throughout the summer, they had become the fullness that they were destined to become. A juicy red or green or multi coloured apple, full of life and giver of joy. Their potential had been realised.

And no one wanted them.

No one needed them.

They hung on the tree waiting to be recognised and picked.

No one came.

They eventually surrendered to gravity and the marauding wasps.

What was left on the ground was the mush being absorbed back into the earth.

Ashes to ashes. Rotten mulch to rotten mulch.

That’s one story.

That’s the story I was witness to on that radiant autumn, Kentish morning.

But there is another story.

Imagine if the apples, when they were beginning to blossom and form and shape and colour, were told, in the summer of their life, that there were two stories, not one, awaiting the autumn of their life.

Yes, they were told, become an apple and some will get eaten but many will be left on the ground.

Yes, the potential of an apple seed and apple blossom is to become an apple.

But there is so much more that can be done with an apple in the autumn of its life.

Apples can be transformed into one of the most useful fruits that you can imagine.

Apples have deeper qualities, like Quercetin, that can be used as

Anti-imflamators

Anti-virals,

Anti-cancer

Anti-depressant

Anti-bacterial

Promoter of healthy hearts

Lowerer of cholesterol

Reducer of diabetes risk

Healthier gut

Promoter of immune system

Anti-oxidant

….as well as delicious cider and the cooks’ faithful friend – apple wine vinegar.

In the autumn of its life, an apple, just when it looks in the peak of realising its obvious potential, or ‘going over the hill’, is on the edge of so, so much more and so, so much more usefulness to the world.

If.

If it knows there is more to being an apple than just being what you see in the shop window.

If it knows that autumn is not the end, but a threshold to cross to everything else that it could become. There is so much more to an apple than just being an apple.

If it knows that potential is not limited to what you can see in the spring and summer of its life.

If it is supported and guided to go across that threshold, where it has to go through a period of necessary suffering and breaking down. The breaking down, the surrendering of holding on to an identity that you and everyone else expects of it. The breaking down from its obvious public persona into its real essential, deeper qualities, that lay beneath its public exterior.

The transformation, the composting of all of the mess and mulch into something carrying the same essential qualities that it has always had, but also entirely different and even more useful to the world.

What if the apple had a deeper, longer term vision for its life?

What if the farmer had a deeper, longer term vision for the potential benefit to humanity of their apples….if they had just helped the apples to prepare and undergo a necessary and meaningful transition in the autumn of their lives?

What if?