#122: The Apple on a Rooftop
When nature provides
Hello there little apple. What are you doing on my roof terrace? Did the storm bring you? The wind that pushed the bin into my path? The gales that tore down the out-of-date ‘To Let’ sign?
I found you on my terrace this morning, a beautiful red orb, placed perfectly as if by benevolent hands. Like a gift from Mother Nature, shining in the collected rainwater.
It shouldn’t seem so miraculous, a piece of in-season fruit turning up at my flat, but it’s strangely easy to forget that apples grow on trees. I find my apples in plastic bags in the supermarket. I do not expect them to turn up out of the blue on my doorstep.
Yet nature provides. Of course it does. We were once hunter gatherers, scavenging what we needed from what was naturally produced. We relied on moments like this — the sudden discovery of fruit. Ripe. Ready to eat. Ready to provide us with the nutrients to survive.
But then we learnt to harness nature, to become an agrarian society. We learnt that sometimes the apples don’t come to our doorstep via nature alone. We learnt to bring them to our doorsteps ourselves.
Then we found machines to do the work for us. We wanted more and more apples. We wanted to sell them to others. We became an industrial society.
And now? Now we don’t need to think so much about apples. We can rely upon them to be there. Now we are selling other things — ideas, communication, and technology. Others look after the apples for us. We are an information society. I walk to the supermarket for my apples so that instead I can sell my words to survive. The creation and presentation of information is what brings my apples to me. I forget the part played by nature, so it is strange to go back to the start, to see an apple brought by the wind, through no economic transaction, onto my rooftop.
I know this apple was probably grown recreationally in a neighbour’s garden, but to me that is beside the point. To me it appeared from nowhere. It brought me back to the simplest method of existing. And it felt natural.
