Wild Apple

That apple that crossed my path the other day wasn’t just an apple. It was one of those flares from what I call the “understory” but what some might call the unconscious, the dreamtime, or the imaginal realm.  

Or it may also be considered “the world behind the world”

I don’t always notice these flares because I am often so focused on the tension and cadence of the pace of time that I lose myself to the sharp shooting, sympathetic neural bolts that send my mind convulsing around “important” and immediate conditions and concerns.

My daily walkabouts around the valley where I live, within the noble, wandering oscillations of the Adirondack foothills, provides me much needed respite from these daily, mundane imperatives.

This is often when it happens that something breaks through, usually unexpectedly but, still as equally, that same something is not new even slightly incongruent amongst the tablature of nature and, once noticed, seems to me to be an obvious and inextricable truth of existence.

On this day it appeared as an apple. A perfect red gem that I almost stepped on in the woods where there were not just this one apple but hundreds upon hundreds of apples hanging above and falling down from the limbs of an orchard like the sweet, juicy seeds of grace that fall down into the human heart so peaked in fertile ripeness mixed with the smell of wild, dying sugar that I lost, for just an instant, all sense of myself and everything else.

And I became that apple.

And then, in another instant, back into myself but slightly bewildered by the space in between that is only informed by instinct and archetype.

That popped an unsolicited question into my mind.

Where is everyone?

Good yummy food

Poor, forgotten apples

We, well at least a vast majority, get apples from the grocery store.