Instant gratification drives our consumer economy. It is our silent personal secret mantra; most people fill some instinctual need, no matter how small, everyday, sometimes without even thinking of it. Our economy has developed a keen ability to fill those needs at an arms length, no matter what it is, legal or illegal. It is a fundamentally human economy that I am in awe of thankfully and dishearteningly. As our economy personalizes and closes the time gap between needing/wanting and filling those needs and wants, I feel we move further away from understanding our relationship to our planet and each other. We need ecological and social sustainability.

Instant gratification drives our consumer economy. It is our silent personal secret mantra; most people fill some instinctual need, no matter how small, everyday, sometimes without even thinking of it. Our economy has developed a keen ability to fill those needs at an arms length, no matter what it is, legal or illegal. It is a fundamentally human economy that I am in awe of thankfully and dishearteningly.
For example, I am thankful that I have food to eat when I am hungry, but I am disheartened that the freedoms to fill that need distort at best, and completely remove at worst, the deep sense of respect and connection to the source of the food that nourishes my body. Only through a long process of education and by grace have I come to put together these thoughts. Often times I do not even pay attention to what I am putting in my mouth, maybe even doing something else at the same time I am eating. As our economy personalizes and closes the time gap between needing/wanting and filling those needs and wants, I feel we move further away from understanding our relationship to our planet and each other.
I have had the privilege to live in a house in the Bay Area that actually has a good-sized and beautiful backyard. I had a strong need to tend a garden like my grandpa did for 20some years before I moved in to the house when he moved to a Sr. living community in 2002. I have planted something each year since and have learned enormously from this small piece of land. There is a mature apricot tree in the yard. It is the only fruit tree that has consistently made great fruit since I can remember the house. (an orange tree is the only other surviving fruit tree in the yard, but I had to do extensive workon and waiting for it to make good fruit again). This apricot tree is to me, the embodiment of the perseverance of my grandpa's lineage; the Armenians. It is a prominent cornerstone of our garden. It was neglected for years, but I have since learned how to care for it.
Each year seeds from scattered fruit from the apricot tree sprout and you can find little apricot trees everywhere. Most don't survive, and I pull a lot of them out. But I let one of them grow that sprung up in a nice place about 15 ft away from the mature tree. A combination of placement, my sensitivity for it's potential, and curiosity, allowed it to grow. I have watched it grow for 5 years.
I have since learned from Chad that it probably won't make good fruit, or fruit at all. It is a little beyond my knowledge of fruit trees, but it has to do with the genetics of hybridization. But apricots where only part of reason behind letting the tree grow. I was curious about letting the tree grow. I grew up with the notion that anything that just springs up out of the ground is somehow either unimportant, or altogether undesirable. The landscape was largely something that we take control of, or have no part of.
I was discovering feelings and thoughts about generations. I was living in a house my dad's parents lived in for 20 years, and whom I had the privilege of knowing growing up and still today.
I was also fresh from discovering thoughts and feelings about our consumer economy I was freshly participating in; as in 'the real world' I had heard all about in my 21 years of school-shelter. The consumer culture we have championed, as it turns out, is a linear, instant gratification, throw-away economy. Living just feet away from a source of food from the earth was challenging my inquisition of the greater cycles that our economy seems to disconnect itself from. And if the one tree wasn't enough, it sent out another generation not far from it's own trunk to send the message of a cyclical system.
This message is not loud and clear like a TV broadcast. It is as gentle as the seasons changing and the rain falling. It is as slow as a plant growing and fruit ripening on the tree. But before a fruit tree can bear fruit, it uses all it's energy to grow an infrastructure to bear the fruit. Strong trunk and limbs to hold the fruit. Enough leaves to capture solar energy, and a root system to support it and absorb minerals and water. When it is ready, it puts out the first few flowers. After 5 years, our little apricot tree made 7 blossoms and stands knee-high with a sturdy trunk.

Recently I had the opportunity to learn a little about tending fruit trees from Chad at the UCSC Center for Agroecology. A well tended fruit tree probably bares little semblance to a wild relative. It is as much man-made as it is 'natural'. Limbs are bent to optimal angles, and pruned to desirable structure and orientation. It is a living sculpture, a symbiotic relationship between human and plant. It thrives because of us and we thrive because of it's fruit. When a tree first begins to blossom, I learned that it is good practice to pick off the flowers so that it concentrates it's energy in vegetation in it's early years. They delay the fruiting in favor of investing in a stronger and more mature foundation.

I have cultivated knowledge I feel is essential to our economic and social survival. We live in confusing and anxious times. I see an economy and culture pulled in two directions; one that we have to do because the economy is driving towards those ends, and one we feel we should do with no economic foundation to attach the trunk of our individual knowledge and survival instincts to. However slow, I feel that the proper foundation is growing, and at best, it is starting to bare fruit on isolated branches. It is important to celebrate this blossoming, but we must know that these fruit are the first, and it is probably best to favor further foundational investment rather than champion any one of those flowers. It could be detrimental if the foundation of society doesn't understand, in mass, what the importance of this new blossoming is for our survival. We can't make the same mistake of innovation and grow for their own sake. We have to be patient and empower a critical mass, a new foundation of understanding that will one day, in the right season, display a calculated blossoming of ecological and social sustainability.