Jenny tells a story about beans purchased by her old garden friend, shared with her friends, & over time the friends saved some of the beans & gave them back to her, & she “speculated that this line of beans could have spread across the entire country.”
“Although there had been a give-&-take between her & her friends, it was not exactly transactional - she wasn’t taking back the things she had given them.”
“Would it be possible not to save & spend time, but to garden it - by saving, inventing, & stewarding different rhythms of life?”
“Beans from the store aren’t just commodities. Sure, you could eat them, but they aren’t end-points & they aren’t dead. At least some of them contain something: the possibility of future beans.”
“As I told more friends about this story, it became an inside joke: Time is not money. Time is beans. Saying it meant that you could take time & give time, but also that you could plant time & grow more of it & that there were different varieties of time. It meant that all your time grew out of someone else’s time, maybe out of something someone planted long ago. It meant that time was not the currency of a zero-sum game & that, sometimes, the best way for me to get more time would be to give it to you, & the best way for you to get some would be to give it back to me. If time were not a commodity, then time, our time, would not be as scarce as it seemed just a moment ago. Together, we could have all the time in the world.”
Beans grown by me & my friends at Tender Heart Gardens in 2019