For some reason, I took notice of a wheat field on the way to work recently, watched it grow from small, green sprouts to taller, much greener stalks, beginning to fade from pale green to yellow and finally to a shade so golden brown you could almost break it off and eat it like a crust of bread.
“Lord, teach me something about the wheat,” I asked God one day.
I saw the wheat die, get harvested and poured into a large, red bin, after which soybeans were planted. Days later, green sprouts began rising, up through the cut-off top of the wheat stems standing stiff and brittle in the pre-fall sun.
“Surely the meaning will come,” I thought. “It has something to do with the paradox of death and life, of the mixture of dead wheat and rising new beans.” But this seemed as trite and boring as the county road I was traveling, and I was forced to admit that I still didn’t know the meaning of it.
I worked for a man at a lumbermill once named H. R. Minton. Fond of making profound statements, he would end these broad declarations with, “Man, woman, or child,” or, “You can take that to the bank.” He was also fond of saying that the progression of life started at the wrong end. “Life is backward,” he would say. “You get all the knowledge needed to live it at the wrong end, when you no longer have the ability to use it, when it’s no longer of any value.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez said something similar. “Wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good,” he wrote in “Love in the Time of Cholera.”
I thought about these sayings as I watched the crop. Is that why it’s so hard to understand, because the truth is all backward to us somehow?
This could be.
But it could also be something else.
Perhaps, I thought, the answer to the wheat is so hard to come by because it’s not of this world. In other words, maybe we were made for something else.
I thought this again while watching the soybeans die a few days ago. The formerly green and waxy plants had shriveled to a dry and lifeless yellow, and, from an aesthetic standpoint, seemed fit for nothing more than the trash heap. But that wasn’t so, I knew. For, hanging from the otherwise shriveling and lifeless growth, hung the pod holding the bean bound to feed the nations.
I still don’t know the secret of the mystery of fall, but I can’t help but think that it begins with the accepting of mystery itself, the notion that it can’t all be explained by the here and now. It rests in the Eternal, and, although we can’t fully understand it, we can nevertheless partake of it if we can make ourselves small enough to receive it.
There is much more to it, I know; and maybe one day I’ll be able to articulate it. I had much more that I wanted to say, in fact, a deeper kernel of truth, but, on that day, as I sat watching the dry beans blow into the back of the grain truck, the meaning seemed to drift off into the upper atmosphere, along with the rising and expanding eternal dust.
Along with his father, Allen Keller runs a lumber business in Stevenson, Alabama. He has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MBA from University of Virginia. He can be reached for comment at allen@kellerlumber.net.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News.
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