I’ve not followed Brain Pickings a lot, but now and again I stumble upon something coming from that site, and it’s almost always magnificent. Making me wonder, kick-starting my curiosity and often being very inspirational. Then I listened to Maria Popova of Brain Pickings in a conversation with Krista Tippett from On Being.
Guess what happened after I was finished listening? I pressed PLAY once more, and took in the entire episode once more. I believe I’ll listen to it over and over again. Because there’s so much interesting stuff in this podcast, beautiful sentences, phrases, stories about Marias grandparents, and much else. It’s hard to pick out one or two things, because it’s truly an episode worth listening to in full.
But the sentence below, which is a quote by a friend of Marias, really hit home. Perhaps because I’ve been talking about the need for personal stewardship with a friend of mine. How it’s a word, and an activity, that we seem to have forgotten, I believe.
Sitting here looking at that quote “Culture needs stewardship, not disruption“, my mind took a leap. To cultivation itself. To the no-dig no-till practice of cultivation put in use by Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser, that I got so enthralled by in the Peak Prosperity podcast. They explained how disruptive it is for soil structure, and hence, for soil-living creatures such as a majority of all wild pollinators, when we dig, till and uproot plants from the ground. They work with nature, rather than against it, and boy, are they rewarded!
There’s more for me to discover here, I can sense it lurking just beneath the surface. So I’ll sit with it, letting it take its time. Sooner or later it will emerge. I won’t try to dig for it, because that would likely just disrupt the process.
Does this quote evoke anything in you?