Hi Friend,
Oh, peaches!
I have to tell you, just for a moment, how much I love peaches. Really, all stone fruit. OK. Just about all summer fruit. (Is there a summer fruit I don't like? I'll have to think about that.) Throughout the year, I'm a berry-girl: blueberries and raspberries. But in this rare moment at the end of summer, Labor Day weekend in the States, of locally grown, ripe stone fruit, I go all in.
Probably every other day, I go to the corner farmstand and pick up the latest fruit. Right now, that's white peaches and yellow nectarines and about five varieties of plums and a few of the early apples. I refrain from eating the apples: I will indulge fully in apple heaven in another few weeks, when we will go apple picking, and the crispness of the air matches the crisp bites.
Fresh peaches and nectarines are here for just a few weeks, and I relish them. A slice here and there throughout the day, enjoyed alongside streaks of golden sunlight through just-turning-chestnut-brown leaves on our maple tree. Lightly chopped and then tossed into a salad with local green arugula and my neighbor's tomatoes; perhaps I'll sprinkle some chunks of white feta on top. The other morning I made Dutch babies (aka German pancakes, and one of my specialty breakfasts) with fresh peaches, drizzled with maple syrup for extra indulgence, and a side of cottage cheese as a nod to the protein deities. I'll make a peach cobbler later this weekend…After I get interviewed for TV series that's scheduled to be aired on PBS next to a waterfall. (More about that tantalizing lead later --- after it happens!.)
I share all this with you as a reMinder that life is fundamentally abundant.
There are trees that, with just some water and sunshine, bear fruit of a variety of colors that hang and linger on the branches. Fruit that humans can just reach up and - just pick. Soft and fuzzy. Soft and sleek. Soft and squishy (hopefully not too squishy).
What a miracle that is!
What a miracle it is that all those hands go out and pick the fruit. 🍑
I know some of the pickers and farmers around here - of the five farm stands near our house, I visit three of them regularly, and have come to get to know the staff, some of whose labor includes as farmhands and gardeners. And I mentioned our neighbor Marc, whom I help tend to his tomatoes and eggplants and peppers and garlic.
Most of the time, though, I don't know the people whose hands pick the fruit that I so enjoy.
Sometimes I read about them in the news.
Some of the news is horrible.
About fruit rotting on trees because the people who signed up to pick them are afraid to go into the fields in case they get snatched by ICE.
An entirely justifiable concern.
According to a recent study, California estimated a 20–40% reduction in the agricultural workforce, leading to $3–7 billion in crop losses and a 5–12% increase in produce prices. USDA Economic Research Service data and recent ICE detention figures show arrests in Southern California rising from 699 in May to nearly 2,000 in June 2025. Those raids disproportionately affect labor-intensive crops like strawberries, exacerbating supply chain disruptions.
Not to mention exasperating fear.
Including fear for many people who are totally legal.
Strange, isn't it, how we take something beautiful and abundant, like fruit growing from a tree, and wrap a big wire of insecurity => scarcity around it.
Surely, that's unnecessary.
It leads to such questions as:
How do we support the people who plant/grow/harvest/sort the food we eat?
How do we support - and understand more generally - labor?
What a great question to ask on Labor Day Weekend!
The relationship between land, labor, and capital is, to put it mildly, a long and fraught one.
Disagreements over who should do what labor at what price (and the lack thereof) contributed to America's bitter Civil War. After the Civil War, unfair labor conditions on plantations, farms - and the growing northern factories - remained.
In the industrial revolution around the late 1800s, unions formed in part out of the understanding that their power was in a lot of everyday people coming together. Their analysis included that the consumer/citizen was relatively limited in their capacities to force industrial bosses to change, whereas workers, when united, had a lot of power, and so they organized themselves. Organizing that, though hard, was, over time, largely successful in creating better working conditions.
In addition to creating critical laws and policies, the labor movement was hugely influential on our calendar system. Perhaps most importantly: the five-day workweek and the two-day weekend. That never would have happened without the labor movement. And then there is Labor Day itself, which arose because of riots, protests, marches, strikes, and negotiations. There was immense pushback about having an official Labor Day.
These days, a lot more Americans (including yours truly) are not part of a union. The ‘freedom’ of the gig economy came alongside the loss of a lot of support, such as paid vacation leave and worker solidarity.
I wonder, given the general policy shift to bring back industry, how much unions will change. How many people will realize how little they can do to fight for their own rights when they are unorganized? Much less undocumented.
Amidst fear, many people are trying to find effective actions.
The NILC recently created a National Employer's Guide for when Immigration comes to your workplace. The American Friends Service Committee has a list of six suggestions to support immigrants right now. It includes contacting your members of Congress. Regularly. Here's an article on, "how to care for your mental health during ice raids according to a therapist."
And (as a reminder of the long-standing anti-immigration sentiments in America, you might be interested in the book, Global Grace Cafe: A love story about battles lost and won in America's war on immigrants, by my friend Pastor Liz Estes)
We are creative people. We keep finding ways to be caring. Sometimes it feels like it’s not enough.
Don’t let that not-enough troll 🧌 overtake you.
And we can ask the bigger questions, too: how do we create more spaces where we can create economies based on the reality that nature-life is abundant?
Most people in America celebrate Labor Day with a BBQ or a family picnic, or that final summer hurrah.
And boy, do we need that. We need rest. Especially in this moment in between the fire of summer and the concentrated harvest work of Fall. We need the pause - we need to play. So Many people work really, really hard. We need family picnics. I love going to my local lake and seeing large families speaking lots of different languages, gathering with lots of different kinds of music playing.
That the promise of abundance is not a promise that you can draw a fence around.
Even when that fence is built.
Like, all the time, those fences are built, in so many ways.
Still, the fruit trees keep blooming.
Sometimes they even grow taller than fences or walls.
There are, still, neighborhoods across America where orange trees and lemon trees and other fruit trees grow in people's front yards, and its ok to pick them when you walk by. (And plenty of places where it's not ok, so do be sure you know which is which).
And there are people like our neighbor Marc, who brings his extra tomatoes across the street for us, leaving them on the hood of our car before he goes to work in the morning.
Of course, we find ways to help him out, too.
That's how economies of mutuality, reciprocity, and abundance work.
As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in her book/essay on the Serviceberry: an economy of abundance:
‘To name the world as gift is to feel one’s membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy—and it makes you accountable. Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way, even though the physical makeup of the “thing” has not changed. A woolly knit hat that you purchase at the store will keep you warm regardless of its origin, but if it was hand-knit by your favorite auntie, then you are in a relationship to that “thing” in a very different way: you are responsible for it, and your gratitude has motive force in the world. You’re likely to take much better care of the gift hat than the commodity hat, because it is knit of relationships. This is the power of gift thinking. I imagine if we acknowledged that everything we consume is the gift of Mother Earth, we would take better care of what we are given. Mistreating a gift has emotional and ethical gravity as well as ecological resonance.’
Oh, and what gifts Mother Earth keeps giving us.
If Labor Day is something you engage with, I hope you can take time to rest. I hope you can support other people in resting. I hope that you can have feasts of peaches, of grilled burgers, of gluten-free cobblers, of whatever your body/heart finds delicious. I hope you wonder about where the food comes from. I hope you can give gratitude to the food and the people who plant and harvest, and pick the food, which might be yourself or your mother, or your neighbor. I hope you weave into your wonderings how you can support the labor of growing food, in whatever way most resonates for you.
I hope we find ways to rematriate our economy, back into one that flows from its rightful source of abundance.
Much nurturing sweetness to you and your labors -
Sara Jolena
