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Now would be the exact time of year harvest would start

By persistently observing a world in which the filaments and fibers that are making up its fabric are not restricted in time, space or energy, a world that you could conveniently call fantasy or dream but thereby would be ignoring my additional reality, a world in which, just to give an example of its marvels, ‘cats can fly low’, clearly referred to in the David Bowie song we named our Rebel after, but only I heard that as a child, totally stunned by its message but this was obviously before I mastered the English language and discovered he actually sings ‘how could they know’, therefore my world, in which every single inhabitant can evoke a divergent interpretation of life, slightly altering my views and beliefs, by relentlessly contemplating that world for years and years it has convinced me nothing is truly impossible.

I share this chirpy dogma with a friend who, when her daughter’s marriage broke down and her sun-in-law left the country, was faced with the immense task of solely managing the saffron plantation she helped set up for them as an outlook on a happier future, meaning daily weed sessions on hands and knees, working the rock solid soil, continuously chased by new overgrowths in places she had just finished cultivating, without ever getting overwhelmed but instead thoroughly enjoying the beauty of the location and how she placed herself in it.

Now would be the exact time of year harvest would start and we would pitch in, three weeks of painstakingly picking each flower by hand, most days thousands of them, then congregate around her kitchen table to carefully take the stamens out and dry them, leaving no room for anything other than pleasurable conversation. Would be, because after gloriously achieving her infeasible goals, she decided to transfer the plantation to someone local, a decision deemed impossible in itself beforehand, but taken almost casually.

In my inner world, the loss of this beloved tradition translates seamlessly into this playful portrait of our own Saffron, thus named because he was born at this same friend’s house, flanked by the last purple flower of the Mallow that blossomed so profusely this year: saffron, no saffron.


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Trying to make ones life sustainable is more than a personal choice and almost automatically leads to a multitude of decisions you have never even thought of before. On this website we share what works for us, or woefully no longer works, obviously without claiming the same for you.

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