Pilgrim Farmer John, our own Heartland Bureau Chief, came through bigtime with a comment on abundance Iowa style. I am pasteing it here in the blog for you. We are trying to demonstrate the phenomenon of abundance in our physical world. And once we have that we can say that there must be something similar going on with our minds and spirits although maybe harder to glimpse. We don’t have any formulas but there must be potential.

“Hola, Amigo Felipe!

I just love it when you “talk farming” 🙂 And corn is such a fertile topic (puns may abound in this reply). Using the generic term “corn” and expecting all corn to be the same is like saying “pilgrim” and trying to picture all of them (us) as homogeneous. It just ain’t so, McGee!
The obvious starting point point, of course, is that PFFelipe’s corn is “sweet” corn. PFJuan’s corn is “field” corn. PFF’s goal when planting his corn is to produce the sweetest ear of corn and in a population adequate to supply his needs for himself and neighbors to eat as well as some to sell on the market. PFJ’s goal is to produce the most “economic” quantity of bushels per acre. Note I didn’t say, “maximum” bushels per acre. You can pour a nearly endless quantity of inputs into an acre inching up that yield until you get to the point of “negative return”. I aim for the point where the last dollar’s worth of input just pays for itself, and that occurs well before the point of “maximum” yield. I think that’s where your “abundance” comes in. Maximum, to me, equals “greed”. Optimum means a balance between what we want to get and what that will “cost” our soil and resources.

If I’ve done a good job of matching up my hybrid selection to the field it’s planted in and chosen the optimum population to plant (around 30,000 seeds/acre for most, but with a wide range possible), each of my corn plant’s ears will have 16 rows of kernels. and around 800 kernels per ear. If I “overplant”, the individual plant responds by producing fewer rows-14, or even 12. “Underplant” and the response is more rows, maybe 18 or even 20. It’s all about balance. A legal bushel of shelled corn is 56 lbs, around 27,000 kernels, more or less depending on depth of kernel. Each of those kernels came from a single “silk” that was fertilized by one of the 5 MILLION or so “grains” of pollen produced by a single tassel. If that sounds like “overkill” keep in mind Michelle’s 1000 seed dandelion, or the 350,000 seeds on a fully grown red root pigweed plant! There’s a lot of competition out there. Abundance, again, in all things of Nature.

And the Spiritual Abundance of which you speak is even more awe inspiring. It’s a “field” where numbers are meaningless. It’s all around us daily in the people we love and the people that love us. You sow that love in your daily Blogs to us, and I can attest to the fact that you have an endless crop of “good” that is being harvested by all of us. We are beholden (a word not used much anymore, but apropos nonetheless) to you for that, Amigo!

SF,
PFJ, MWBC”

And we go on down the trail. We have a winter morning walk in moments. Abundant loves, Felipé.