My wife and I own an olive grove on the Greek island of Kefalonia. I hope the grove is still there after all those fires the Greeks have been fighting this August. But you know, even if the fires do sweep through our grove, I sort of suspect some or all of trees will survive, and maybe even be better for it.
The land comprises rolling hills. When we bought it, the olive groves were overgrown with years of wild growth. So we hired a bulldozer to restore the hillside terraces. Today, we have lovely hillside terraces with centuries old olve trees.
But during this work, the bullzoer uprooted two of the trees, and dumped the stumps and rootballs on another part of the land. Later, we piled brush on these tree stumps, and set fire to the brush and the stumps as part of seasonal clean up.
When we returned the next year, these charred uprooted stumps of olive trees displayed new healthy sprouts. Today, these trees have renegerated. We have to decide what to with these now ugly hulks of trees that just refuse to die.
On a similar vein, when we first bought the grove, we noticed that the grove of our neighbor had been pruned. When I say "pruned", I mean that someone had cut these olive trees down to stumps no higher than my knee. To our virgin eyes, the neighbor's grove had been destroyed.
But within three years, the neighbor's grove was bigger, thicker, and lusher than ours, and bore infinitely more olives. Ah, the wonder of pruning.
Anyway, these olive stories got me interested in the broader notion of pruning. For example, I have read that our human bodies regularly prune dead cells and slough them out of our bodies.
So I got to thinking about pruning activities to which I could submit my human body that would have the beneficial effect of regeneration. So far, I have identified three such pruning activities of mine:
I just submitted a testimony on the first. The idea there is that water fasting gives my gastrointestinal tract a break from disgestion. This allows it to concentrate on repair. In other words, this system can use this time to prune underperforming cells.
The third item in the list speaks for itself.
The second item in the list is something about which I'll need to submit other Recipes and Testimonies.
How about you? What are your "pruning" activities?
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