"Auto-da-fé"
Mediocrity salivates at the thought of the finished product or end result. People don’t want to do the thing, they want to have done it. Doing implies a process, and ‘process’ is forgotten in the vocabulary of most. We’re a teleological culture that idolizes results. Thus, we fail to see that value is found in the means not the ends. Getting anything worthwhile is worthless if you haven’t changed in the process.
Winter was bad, no doubt. Negative 26 degrees destroys plants that spent thousands of years evolving in warmer climates – there is a reason why cold countries drink beer and spirits, not wine – but a bad winter only means the end if you submit. The naysayers get louder as time slips past. This time they proclaim either a total loss or a 10% survival rate at best.
I’m not interested in their predictions because human beings are simple creatures looking for simple answers. All too often we make the mistake of following blindly the dictates of others without asking why. Life is never simple, things are never clear. Someone’s self righteous certainty is a delusion. It is why we must move forward as imperfectly as we can, because perfect conditions don’t exist in the real world. You can keep waiting but time and the rest of the world carries on.
The wait this spring was grating, but buds have burst and growth has begun. I look back at the effort of the last two years with eyes hollowed out by 4am wake-ups and 10pm bed-times; digging, demolishing, digging, planting, digging, transplanting, and more digging. This vineyard’s progress was fueled by caffeine and alcohol in equal measure. Whatever the fuel though, process is the means to an end.
In nature death weeds out weakness and the quitters, a cold Darwinian calculus is the closest thing we have to a natural law. So, if you believe the vines to be dead, then so be it. The easy way was never our path but it may be yours. We will burn at the pyre before we stop now. Moving forward is the only way. We do more than we can by working with what we have rather than lamenting what we don’t. Spring has given way and we pass into the summer through the slow burn of an auto-da-fé.
Winter was bad, no doubt. Negative 26 degrees destroys plants that spent thousands of years evolving in warmer climates – there is a reason why cold countries drink beer and spirits, not wine – but a bad winter only means the end if you submit. The naysayers get louder as time slips past. This time they proclaim either a total loss or a 10% survival rate at best.
I’m not interested in their predictions because human beings are simple creatures looking for simple answers. All too often we make the mistake of following blindly the dictates of others without asking why. Life is never simple, things are never clear. Someone’s self righteous certainty is a delusion. It is why we must move forward as imperfectly as we can, because perfect conditions don’t exist in the real world. You can keep waiting but time and the rest of the world carries on.
The wait this spring was grating, but buds have burst and growth has begun. I look back at the effort of the last two years with eyes hollowed out by 4am wake-ups and 10pm bed-times; digging, demolishing, digging, planting, digging, transplanting, and more digging. This vineyard’s progress was fueled by caffeine and alcohol in equal measure. Whatever the fuel though, process is the means to an end.
In nature death weeds out weakness and the quitters, a cold Darwinian calculus is the closest thing we have to a natural law. So, if you believe the vines to be dead, then so be it. The easy way was never our path but it may be yours. We will burn at the pyre before we stop now. Moving forward is the only way. We do more than we can by working with what we have rather than lamenting what we don’t. Spring has given way and we pass into the summer through the slow burn of an auto-da-fé.