'Glean with gratitude.'
The word glean has two contexts historically (for me).
A reference to the Biblical story of Ruth, in which she and her mother-in-law Naomi glean in the fields.
A reference to the wonderful 2000 Agnès Varda documentary The Gleaners & I, in which we clamber aboard the inexhaustible joy and journey of a woman as she roams the French countryside conversing with gleaners. And gleaning. And meditating about life.
So what is gleaning?
According to the Oxford dictionary, gleaning can refer to:
“…collect(ing) gradually and bit by bit.”
”gather (leftover grain or other produce) after a harvest.”
”extract (information) from various sources.”
I love this word. How can you not after reading what it means and what it can mean?
‘Mama would love those’
We were driving along and I was hoping, hoping, hoping that maybe two boys would fall asleep in the back seats so I could stop, park, and either power nap for ten minutes or finish the final story in the Haruki Murakami collection I’m reading, or…perhaps do both.
God said here’s fifty percent. The 2-year old went out hard. I thought, I thought Mr. Five-Year Old Big Shot was heading that direction, until I heard the exclamation that caused me to (almost) slam on the brakes.
Look! There’s beautiful flowers,
they’re so pretty and I bet Mama would love them…
can I see if any of them have fallen on the ground?!
What’s there to do? I turned around, pulled up alongside a business park area with a row of neatly clipped bushes and…flowers, and cautioned him to only glean - yes, glean - what he could from dropped petals and blossoms on the ground.
He did so, immersed in a world of curating and collecting nature’s scraps. He carefully chose, discarded, updating me on what he was looking for and keeping center thought the idea that she would be drawn to certain types - including ones that might have some pollen in them still.
Finally, he assembled a double-handful of petals and blossoms and we embarked again in our motor vehicle.
Then repeated the process again. It’s an ongoing process and there’s not an end.
Our route was circuitous, laborious, slow, and filled with more joy than can be manufactured or interpreted from 0s and 1s.
Maria Garcia, in a critique of The Gleaners and I for Film Journal International, wrote:
Searching for beetles and treasures
‘A film for everyone who has stopped, in curiosity, to look at what someone else has discarded and on occasion, taken it home.'
I love that description. Love.
We have grown increasingly familiar with the concept of planned obsolescence; the idea that manufacturers make products fully with the knowledge that they have a finite lifespan. In other words,
things are built to break, to fail, to no longer work.
We’re okay with that, societally, because of the Faustian handshake deal implicit in this interchange: that even though things will break, we can get them cheap and easy. Again and again and again. With the rise of subscription models as well, it means we don’t need to concern ourselves with fixing something. We can discard and turn in for something new. Something goes wrong, there’s an easily-replaceable upgrade.
This isn’t any radical realization. Many have written about this in eloquent and well-researched terms, and I benefit from this mode of operation as well. I acknowledge my hypocrisy. I am weary of trying to keep old tools and small engine machinery going; thank you, YouTube, for providing some sort of lifeline for people such as myself who are not inherently gifted with a mechanic’s skills - or who have not taken the time to become proficient or even middlingly competent.
I am weary of spending chunks of my life fixing things and trying to keep old things going. There is a balance though, I suppose, and occasionally cautious exultation when I Lazarus something. I’ve resuscitated and given new life to old technologies others have discarded. Getting a decade-old MacBook Pro going is a little more in my skill set than getting a lawn mower again. At least…it’s way easier for me.
This is not a diatribe against The New. Electric vehicles are still going through research and growth phases as hiccups, challenges, and issues with them get worked out. Someday I hope to own one. Or…rent one? Subscribe to one? Do we keep fixing old vehicles and equipment running on carbon-based fuels? Does Tesla plan to get into the chainsaw market? If so, that’s probably a little more in my budget currently than a Model X SUV.
What I want our children to do - and to help remind us to do - is to think.
We can think about what we consume, what we eat, what we buy, what we use and reuse.
I wish I had the skills, knowledge, money, time, energy, resources to go off the grid…yet still keep in entirety the comforts and ease we currently possess by virtue of being on the grid. I’m not anti-grid. I’ve accepted the comfort value and easy access use of many things in life.
But we can still mindfully consider what we use. We can glean. We can glean both the concrete, tangible, physical, and we can glean the abstract, the knowledge, the wisdom of what’s there, waiting to be scraped and collected; turning the forgotten and old into the remembered and re-cherished.
We are not currently scouring dumpsters for our meals.
We are not currently digging through garbage for new shirts.
We are not currently hitching rides or riding bicycles everywhere we need to go.
We have been willing to accept and embrace The Used. In many forms.
Second-hand stores, thrift shops, Grocery Outlet :) , hand me-up, hand me-down, hand me-over clothes, end-of-life computers, flowers and petals and broken blossoms…
A character trait that must accompany gleaning is gratitude.
In order to glean something, something must have produced or made or provided the opportunity for something to be left behind. So, for example, when I speak of gleaning in respect to second-hand clothes, I have enough self-awareness to perceive how arrogant, out-of-touch, and tone-deaf it might be to place ourselves at the center of some self-created ecosystem of hyper self-sufficiency. That is not the case and not the truth. We’ve benefited from some wonderful relationships around us, such as my sister and sister-in-law and some long-time friends, for example, who have both gifted us many clothes as their children have outgrown them. I am filled with appreciation for the opportunity they’ve given us to continue using many colorful and stylish clothing that our four kids have benefitted from.
I’ve benefitted from the generosity of brothers who have passed along equipment and technologies; things they knew I could glean use from, despite their missing out on cash payouts for just reselling. What we use has a life, and its life might start with us but continue with someone else. That’s a good thing.
If you glean, you are taking something that once belonged to something or someone else; something they made or started or created. And you must express an appreciation, a gratitude for that in some way. And continue the cycle.
It is humbling; the reminder that we benefit from who and what has come before us.
We can find ways to express Thank You.
We wouldn’t have rose petals waiting to be scooped up gently from the grass and dirt, if there hadn’t been somebody who had lovingly tended to a rosebush to begin with and helped provide it a healthy opportunity to flourish, and to provide something of both obvious beauty, and something of lesser beauty to many. Something to glean.
On the ground
Our five-year old has been ecstatic about the blossoms, petals, and pieces of flowers he’s found all around. The flowers, the flowers are beautiful in their glory, hanging and drooping and perched on their root systems poking out of the soil…
…but this boy, our boy, has found so much beauty and joy in collecting, in gleaning the leftovers; in extracting what’s been discarded.
So much of learning isn’t new information.
It’s old stuff you already know that you get reminded of. This was my lesson for today. Gleaning. And gratitude. The importance of these things in symbiotic connection with one another.
There is beauty, a great joy to be found in gleaning scraps of what’s there, of gathering bit by bit what’s there; wisdom from others, toys to repurpose and re-imagine, and flower remnants to gather, to glean,
and bring to your mom.
I think she loved these dirty-pretty petals, brought in dirty-dirty hands, delivered with gratitude and love. I think she did.
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