Some readers will have experienced significant technology changes in harvesting grain. WhenI was young; we still used a threshing machine where several neighbors brought their horses and hayracks, gathered the sheaves from the fields, and forked them into the threshing machine. While I was still on the farm, my Dad bought a small, self-propelled, Massey-Harris combine. It had a seven foot cutter bar and a different head for picking up swathed grain. Harvesting a quarter section took days with that combine. Modern combines take hours to harvest the same acreage.
Our little combine had a feature which has been abandoned on newer machines; it bagged the weed seeds. This bagging of weed seeds strikes me as a useful metaphor for harvesting and articulating our personal wisdom. We experience life in a mix of planned and haphazard events. Our personal harvester removes most of the straw and chaff and weed seeds and leaves us with the tools we rely on every day. Most of these tools emerge, as needed, without our conscious effort. However, the weed seeds drop back in the field around us, they tend to germinate, grow, and compete with the tools we’ve nurtured.
I’m working on an autobiography where I hope to identify the incidents and circumstances that led to my store of wisdom and helped me bag the weed seeds and feed them to the birds. You may conclude I didn’t use a big enough bag!