You are sitting in a field on the earth. It’s being plowed by a huge yellow combine harvester. Up and down the massive machine goes, churning up the fields and exposing the roots, stones, and worms from below. Round and round the field it travels, over and over churning the land up.

You feel really small and inconsequential in comparison to the huge machine ploughing away. Tiny. Like a speck with little power. You look beyond the field and into the wider vista and notice that all the fields have been ploughed. As far as the eyes can see there are ploughed fields, ready for planting you think.

As you ponder the fields and springtime, and how fast time seems to go, you notice that the man who was driving the combine harvester is walking up to you. You were so busy in your thoughts, that you had not even noticed him pause, get out and walk across the field towards you.

“Hey there” he shouts.

“I see you watching me, do you want to jump in and keep me company, while I plough the rest of the field?”. Strange offer you think to yourself and you wonder if it’s safe. But then you know the farmer and you live nearby, so you suspect that it must be okay.

“Why not, you hear yourself say. You follow him back to the huge yellow machine, which is even bigger close up. He shows you how to climb up the steps to jump in. It’s pretty high you think, feeling a bit wobbly as you climb up. Heights not being one of your strong suits.

He starts it up, it’s quite loud, but then turns into more of a gentle hum, as all the doors are sealed.

“How does it feel being up so high?” he asks, looking at you with bemusement

“Strange” you say. “Almost as if I am looking at a completely different view of things. Up here to down there, shifts everything quite radically”.

“Indeed, it does” he breathes

 “what exactly are you doing?” You ask. You have lived in this area all your life, but not having lived or worked on a farm, you have very little idea of what happens, and what the details are.

“Well we are basically turning up the fields, to move it all around. We want to move around what was on the top layer and bring up what was beneath to the surface. We can’t plant new seeds on fields that have just been harvested as they are full of old growth, and roots. They must be churned up.”

That makes sense you think. “And then what happens?  you ask, always needing to know the details.

The man seems pleased that you are asking about something he knows about. For some reason you can’t even seem to see his face very clearly as the sun is streaming in, but you feel it in his energy. Everyone likes to feel important in some way you think.

He tells you that the farmer will come and inspect the fields afterwards to see what they need and decide which crops he will grow. The field is a living being, an organism he explains. We can have plans for the field and what we want to do with it, but the field is alive, the earth is alive and all the little worms and grubs that move through the soil and filter it are alive. So the field works on it’s terms. We can try to influence it through what we give it, but we cannot control the elements. Neither the earth, the sun, the wind or the rain are under our control. All that is under the guidance of the gods.

The farmer knows this. The farmer works with the spirts and the gods of the earth: the land, the wind, the sun, the rain and the moon. He knows these fields as if they were him, his body and he knows what they need and when the time is right.

The problem in today’s society the farm hand continues is that we abuse the land and we abuse our own bodies. We try to force the land to work on our time in our control and to our deadlines. But this is nature, as we are nature. It’s the gods that decide in the end. The gods of the elements. The farmer can work with the elements if they allow him to, or not.

So, he looks at the fields after they have been churned up and ploughed and sees if they need fertiliser or some extra strength to make them ready for new growth.

Ah you say. That smell that plagued me my whole childhood. Fresh country smell we used to call it. As it used to stink to high heaven and that was our family joke. That’s right the man says. The farmer here is natural. He doesn’t like chemicals. He believes that it builds aggression and evil into the plants, which flows into the bodies of those that eat it, causing disease and darkness.

That sounds like it makes sense you say. It’s not something I think about too much really. Now I see I need to think about it more.

“It must be very hard for the farmer”, you say. “What happens if the fields are not ready for crops?”

Well then, he can’t plant. But this is normal. The farmers know that there are times when the land needs to sit and rest. The replenish itself. To allow the worms and the grubs and the elements to work with it, so it comes back to a natural healthy state.

Of course, that is difficult when the farmer needs to feed his family. Which is how many of them, ended up going down the chemical path. Because they could not wait for the natural path of time and the gods to let the elements work. They tried to force the hand of god and now look how that is manifesting on the planet, he said.

It’s a planet of disease and devastation, as none of us can wait for anything. Neither food nor health nor love. We try relentlessly to force and control the hand of god. As we see, A it does not work for the farmer, nor for ourselves.

Sometimes to allow the soil to restore to optimum strength to be able to take on and grow new seeds the land needs to sit for a while and rest. Just as we should sit and listen to what the elements are telling us.

Then we will know what to do next. How to gain strength, how to purify, and when we are ready for the new seeds. Rushing does not work. We can’t force the hand of god. The universe does not work like that he says.

I’ve finished for the day now says the man. I have to wait for the farmer to come and look at the soil and what’s needed next. Lovely to meet you. I’ll help you down now.

Gosh you think. You only stepped into the harvester for a new perspective of the earth, and here you got a wealth of world lessons. Isn’t life interesting sometimes.