"Ugliness"
It is supposed to be idyllic, isn’t it? It is supposed to be beautiful. Rolling hills and picture-perfect clichés of neat vineyard rows and trimmed lawns. That’s the dream, it’s what they pay for: a fast track to the finish line of postcard panoramas, but without the work. The picture is only complete with hollow smiles in white linen outfits walking through ‘estates’, swirling glasses of blissful ignorance. Pop a pose, filter, and upload. Pass by the truckloads of pesticide, on to the next shiny thing. We didn’t need those bees anyway. Remember, it’s the sulfites that give you headaches.
It’s is not beautiful to take shortcuts in what is supposed to be slow process. The express train to success is empty. What happened to putting time in? What about the blistered farm hands, blood crusted under the fingernails, with each swollen knuckle barely able to grasp the tools needed to do the job? Where’s the leathery skin with sweat dripping over precancerous lesions? That’s the kind of beauty we’re after. Give us ugliness or don’t give us the dream at all. We’ll take the weeds if it means that it’s our sweat, our blood, and our years that are exchanged for the growth of quality fruit. We don’t want to start at the finish because, if that’s the case, then it’s a journey that’s not worth starting at all.
Forget purchasing the finished product and achieving dreams where nobody wanted to put in the effort. It’s all trite, empty and ugly. Give us degradation, renewal, and rebirth. Give us the slow road of trial and error, more trial, more error, and after years or even decades of apprenticeship maybe we can have a shot at creating something authentic and real.
People like to buy their way to success. Pay the consultant instead of taking the time to learn, hire a labourer instead of doing the work. Then, off to the next shiny thing, again. It’s a shortcut that betrays a lifetime of more shortcuts. A banal way to exist. In all too many ways the vine is like a human being. The ones that produce the best fruit are the ones that suffer. Only then do we understand that beauty is ugliness, and ugliness is beautiful. So - change of view - now is never the wrong time to start at the beginning. Depth takes time.
It’s is not beautiful to take shortcuts in what is supposed to be slow process. The express train to success is empty. What happened to putting time in? What about the blistered farm hands, blood crusted under the fingernails, with each swollen knuckle barely able to grasp the tools needed to do the job? Where’s the leathery skin with sweat dripping over precancerous lesions? That’s the kind of beauty we’re after. Give us ugliness or don’t give us the dream at all. We’ll take the weeds if it means that it’s our sweat, our blood, and our years that are exchanged for the growth of quality fruit. We don’t want to start at the finish because, if that’s the case, then it’s a journey that’s not worth starting at all.
Forget purchasing the finished product and achieving dreams where nobody wanted to put in the effort. It’s all trite, empty and ugly. Give us degradation, renewal, and rebirth. Give us the slow road of trial and error, more trial, more error, and after years or even decades of apprenticeship maybe we can have a shot at creating something authentic and real.
People like to buy their way to success. Pay the consultant instead of taking the time to learn, hire a labourer instead of doing the work. Then, off to the next shiny thing, again. It’s a shortcut that betrays a lifetime of more shortcuts. A banal way to exist. In all too many ways the vine is like a human being. The ones that produce the best fruit are the ones that suffer. Only then do we understand that beauty is ugliness, and ugliness is beautiful. So - change of view - now is never the wrong time to start at the beginning. Depth takes time.