This time of year is traditionally a peak season in the harvesting of grains, fruit and vegetables that grow relatively easily in our British climate. Over the bank holiday weekend, I picked crab apples from our garden and boiled them up to make crab apple jelly. I love the colours and textures of the ripe crab apples on the trees, the smell of them cooking in the pot and the gorgeous rosy pink of the resulting jelly. As I transfer the flush, boiling liquid to recycled jam and chutney jars, I imagine the comfort of the jelly spread on toast in the winter months and of offering some of the jars to friends and family as gifts. So much pleasure from such simple tasks and a wonderful, lasting outcome from the planning and nurturing of the preceding 12 months!
I wonder how the lessons learned here can be applied to other areas of our lives.
Personal Harvesting.
Perhaps we can view a personal harvest as being the result of:
• Sewing seeds – recognising possible opportunities and acting on them
• Nurturing seedlings – observing those opportunities that look like they might evolve into projects. Taking next steps to help them move along a little. Encouraging, feeding, without trying to force them to grow.
• Watching for signs of disease or pests and taking action to protect my projects.
• Letting go of projects that are too weak to survive or that do not grow according to plan.
• Recycling what’s left – the lessons learned, the raw materials, the support structure that nurtured and protected them – and either composting or preserving for use on other projects.
An important part of this process for me is letting go of attachment to outcomes, acknowledging what we can influence and accepting those things over which we have no control. In my garden, I can be influential in a lot of ways – where and when I decide to plant things, how much I feed and protect them. But I cannot control the weather and that has a major effect on the results of my hard work. Although I can act according to what happens with the weather in order to improve my chances of success.
Similarly in life, I find my stress levels are reduced by doing what I feel is good enough with any project and then, rather than expecting any particular result, to simply observe and respond to what actually happens.
We can apply the same principles in human relationships. In his work on Non-Violent Communication, Marshall Rosenburg stresses that, when we ask someone for help or ask them to change some behaviour that upsets us, there is a big difference between making a demand and making a request of someone. A demand is something he regards as an act of aggression and he says is likely to be met with an equally aggressive response. A genuine request, on the other hand, is kinder and compassionate in nature and likely to elicit a favourable answer. What’s the difference between a demand and a request, you might ask? With a demand we are attached to a particular outcome, the obedience to our demand! With a request we are ok with the other person saying no. A genuine request is pure and unconditional.
The ironic outcome of this is that we can ask anyone for whatever we want if we can just be ok with the possibility of them saying no! (And what’s more, because of our kinder approach, they are more likely to say yes!)
A personal harvest is the result of a process of sewing and nurturing seeds of opportunity and encouraging them to fruition whilst letting go of:
• any failures or negative responses
• any attachment to particular outcomes.
This site seeks to explore the heart and soul of downshifting to a more sustainable, ethical and holistic way of living and working, in keeping with the needs of the planet, humanity as a whole and ourselves as individuals. 
Very inspiring, thank you. I agree that a request made without any expectation will be more effective than a demand. We tend to place ourselves under immense pressure through our actions and expectations. In the end it is better to let things go and to focus on what we can do well.