“Resistance . . . is not a separate force, but comes from the flow itself, and enables the unfolding of what in it is always potentially there; it precipitates the collapsing of its own potential into the actual” (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things) 

I picked a basket of apples from our campus at Prescott College today, both as a harvest of memories and of possible futures. 

Every college at which I’ve had the honour of taking a leadership role, we have held an annual apple pressing — harvested in turn from Sterling College’s Vermont hillsides, Schumacher College’s centuries-old trees (mixed as they were amongst medieval quince and ancient medlar trees) in southwestern England, and Prescott College’s more recently cultivated varieties suitable for the higher climate of north-central Arizona. In the 1990s, I was fortunate to work at an apple farm in western Maine. Part of the work there, too, was pressing countless bushels of fallen apples into cider between folded felt and wooden slats with a 19^th-century hydraulic press. 

Apples, juice, and cider have for me been a connective flow across bioregions, communities, and continents. At Schumacher, we pressed apples in a wooden barrel press and filled hundreds of bottles with juice to be served with meals throughout the seasons; years later, the flavour of dried fruits mixed with porridge alongside juice bottled by the community the year before lingers in my memory. 

Earlier this month, Prescott College’s own Harvest Festival invited students, staff, families, and friends to share in a meal and cider pressed (often by eager children shepherded by our students) from the trees whose boughs still held unharvested apples just above. 

“May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan” (“Unharvested,” Robert Frost)

When I returned today to pick a few apples for my own family, I left many dozens behind, some still low enough for deer, higher ones for birds and squirrels. My harvesting was part of an ancient ritual, which echoes backwards through shared histories and forward in a dialogue with infinite narratives of possibility. Fermented, or ‘hard’ cider (in the UK, simply ‘cider’) is itself a process of alchemic transformation. Patience, both in the cultivating, grafting, nurturing to fruition — and in the bottling, storing, and fermenting — is critical.

You can’t rush apples. 

“I’ve become a lover of slowness, patience, endurance, and long-term vision, because these things see, like crucial equipment for changing the world or even understanding it” (Rebecca Solnit). 

Picking an apple from a tree is, then, only a small part of a process, the outcome of which can be as infinite as the unexpected flavours of wild apples from trees thickened by animal browse — whether eaten fresh, baked, sauced, juiced, canned, dried, or fermented. As a sometime writer, I can’t help but think about those possibilities when the trees blossom in the springtime, full of stories and promise, and, in cooperation with their stewards, speak to a resilient yet unknowable future.

“Books have plots, because they are finite and authored; the world has an infinite number of authors, of whom you are one, and the surprising outcomes are often due to underestimated agents” (Rebecca Solnit)

This movement and its manifestations, with which I’ve been preoccupied for the better part of a decade, have come to adumbrate the infinite unknowable — whether the apeiron of Anaximander’s world, the vortex of Democritus, Lucretius’s clinamen, or Siddhārtha’s Nirañjanā. The celestial nature of apples left unharvested on the uppermost boughs, dark against the bright Arizona sky, connected as they are to histories and futures alike, invites us to consider, as Thomas Nail writes, “the material conditions for the emergence of things are themselves not things,” or, more pointed still: “Movement is reality itself” (Henri Bergson).

With this in mind, I reach to pick another apple — seeking one not yet split by the heat or prised open by birds or squirrels — both as labour of love and metaphor for the heavy lifting that lies ahead, because, as Audre Lorde writes, “to refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. . . . Each of us must find our work and do it.”