For Everything A Time

My wife recently bought local peaches from the Farmer’s Market. Yesterday, I decided to have one as a morning snack; nothing was particularly unusual about a morning snack nor my eating fruit she brought home.

The peach I chose from the bowl cut easily and was ripe. The first bite was a heavenly experience and each successive bite was just as delicious. A peach tree in Pennsylvania had been planted and grown and had spent this spring and summer bringing that fruit to ripeness. The wind and rain and sun and soil and pollinators had added to its growing. Now I was enjoying this fruit.

Sometimes in the winter we get a peach at a chain grocery locally. Likely because it had to be brought from somewhere else where peaches might grow in January, that peach was picked green, before it had ripened, and through a process was “artificially” ripened for consumption. The flavor is not as rich though it is still a peach.

This set me to thinking about ripening and timing. My desire for a peach out of season gets me a peach, one that is picked prior to ripeness and delivered from far away. If I wait for the our local summer in the Northern Hemisphere, I can enjoy a fresh, ripe peach because it is in season, it has had time to ripen and absorb the various nutrients provided in its own time.

I wonder sometimes if we don’t try to rush the ripening process in ourselves or we spend energy lamenting not being ripe before instead of now. “There is a season for everything and a time for every purpose” to paraphrase the biblical text of Ecclesiastes 3.

We ripen when we are ready. Aspects of us ripen at different times in our lives. Perhaps we physically ripen long before we are mentally, emotionally, or spiritually ready to fully appreciate our ripeness. Or we let our perceptions of the world create expectations in us to use the not-quite-ripe us in ways we later regret.

This made me think of a quote by one of my favorite twentieth-century mystics:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages…

-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

I would be the first to admit I am challenged with waiting and trusting the process of ripening. I am, indeed, in a rush to “reach the end without delay.” [Breathe] When I slow down and am present now-here, I discover the joy where I am; the anticipatory voice inside calms and quiets as does the voice that laments not being-there-yet. It is a learning to recognize and “catch” the pattern arising that for me helps me be present. Receive and Release.

Everything, everyone ripens in their own timing. I encourage taking a breath and being present now; enjoy this moment. Trust that you will know within when time and you are ripe. And I invite myself and you to be thankful for where I am, where you are, now. Here we are, ripening with time and love.