These last couple of years, the smells, low light, and flavors of October—my never-quite-ready-for-it favorite season, birthday season, apple season, aspens-golding-so-get-ready-to-let-go season—have been deeply shaded with grief. I lost a dear friend two years ago at this time, my friend Kim: “a druid and wizard and scholar of apples,” as I memorialize him, briefly, in this fifteenth episode of Kinward.
This time of year, in past years, Kim would be bringing me a box of Magic Etters from his orchard for my birthday. The Magic Etter—a perfect tart miracle of an apple, yellow inside and out, with a red blush on its cheek, so citrusy-vibrant that the cider pressed from it never turns brown—is my favorite apple, and a rare one: there are perhaps six or seven Etter trees in the world, and each of these, including the one in my little food forest, exists thanks to Kim and his brothers, who salvaged the variety as scion wood from a scrappy seedling from an orchard in California that didn’t see the value of this excellent little fruit.
It’s a long and wonderful story that Kim, if he were here, would tell with flair, as he told each of the hundreds of stories he loved to tell.
I’ve known Danae Yurgel, my guest on this episode, for several years, and as I look back on my too-few-but-many years of knowing and loving Kim, one of my regrets is that I never introduced these two apple enthusiasts to one another. I consider each of them mentors in the arts of orcharding and a life well lived, and while I’ve told each of them that, and I told them about one another many times while Kim was still alive, I never quite got that dinner party pulled together. You know—you think you have time.
I can imagine it, though. I can imagine Kim and Danae trading stories of scion wood recovered from forgotten orchards or the side of the road, vowing to trade especially beloved varieties, comparing rootstocks, tasting ciders and pears and seaberry mead around a long table, going off on a tangent about obscure martial arts observances, partners and friends (and me) there too, half-listening to these two fruit-besotted kindred spirits while celebrating some other milestone, as the first fire of the cold season hisses and pops in the stove in Kit and Kim’s warm and woven home.
In some other unfolding of the world, may it be so.
Danae Yurgel Danae is a Tai Chi instructor, a student of rewilding, and the current steward of Avella Orchard, a 2-acre heirloom fruit and nut orchard in La Grande, Oregon.
Danae has had a deep and abiding love of trees, plants, flowers and all things wild all her life. She was involved early on with the permaculture and sustainable farming movements, serving in apprenticeships around the Pacific Northwest.
Avella orchard was first planted in the 1930s by Mr. Ryan, a nurseryman, grafter, and early adopter of organic stewardship, and his wife, Mrs. Ryan, a schoolteacher and author of children’s books. The orchard is home to more than 250 fruit and nut trees, including many rare and one-of-a-kind varieties. Danae and her partner David are carrying on the founders’ traditions of working with children, sharing the bounty of the orchard (from scion wood to fruit to starts), and perpetuating the precious heritage of these heirloom trees for the following generations.
The orchard is a tended and a wild place, a place where, as Danae beautifully describes, nothing is wasted and all is in relation. Ecosystems, including human-tended ones, can find their way back into balance—and this takes time, and trust.
The stories of individual apple varieties and trees, the stories of glass houses and clouds of crows, are woven, in this episode, among many hard-won embodied reflections on what it is to live life well, as an entangled being among beings, in relationships that are reciprocal by nature, if we could just remember that.
As Danae says,
“I think it was in high school I first found out about, you know, people breathing out carbon dioxide, the tree breathing it in; the tree breathing out oxygen, we’re breathing it in. We’re breathing out. The giving cycle.
Again, it’s about relationship. It’s about connection. We need to give as much as the tree needs to give. To exist! You know, we have to breathe out. We can’t always be breathing in. You have to breathe out.”
A deep inquiry of this episode, and of this podcast, and of my life, is the question of enough. How will we know, each of us, when we can stop striving, pause grasping, even for a moment, and rest in trust that we have enough, that we are enough? How might we fulfill our own needs for safety and sustenance while also protecting enough for and among the other beings that share our lives and our world?
As adrienne maree brown puts it, a great question of our times is “Are we satisfiable?”
In the abstract, I know this is a very important question. In my life, I return to it often and notice how it feels in my body when I say things like, my little place is enough, my heart is big enough, I spend enough time working, enough time playing, I have enough security, enough good food, enough deep loving relationships.
It’s a practice, to say these things, to try to feel them, to feel into them.
I stall out a little, though, feeling for a sense of enough in my grief in this season, these last two years. It’s hard to ever feel that you had enough time with a dear one you lost too soon. It feels almost sacrilegious, in this culture of refusing to let go, to say, I had enough time with that person.
I haven’t yet “made friends with” Kim’s death, as Danae puts it in this episode, referring to a lost friend of her own. But this October, at her invitation, I’m once again committing to exploring enough—yes, with this grief, and with this harvest, too, and with my body and intentions and projects and present.
I hope the invitation into a wild, embodied discernment of enough is rich territory for you, too, as you listen to this abundant episode of Kinward.
As for gratitudes…this one’s for Kim, and for Kit, with love.
Take good care, friends, and remember to hold your dear ones close. You may not have the time you think you have. But maybe—let’s just feel into this together—just maybe you’ll have enough.
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