After Harvest
PRINT PAGE
After Harvest
In her autobiographical book titled After Harvest, Mary-Ellen Bidner brings the reader into her experience of being one of eight children, raised in rural Queensland, Australia, during the 1960s.
This book reveals all the difficulties one might imagine there to be in a large family, living in the country, at a time when money is scarce. But unless this has been your lived experience, especially in such a large family, you probably really cannot imagine what it was like. This book allows you to look inside.
Without giving away the cleverness of the title, I can’t help but flag that when I came to the paragraph that first revealed the use of the phrase ‘After Harvest’ within her family, I was given a full set of realisations that endeared me to the book.
Mary-Ellen takes us there with a generous heart. She recounts clearly how it was growing up in this crowded household, with these parents, with these siblings in these circumstances. And now, with the bonus of being able to see beyond the outer appearances, she looks more deeply at the energy at play in the family dynamic that she was born into. The author has done a spectacular job of speaking honestly about her life, without injecting any blame on her parents, her siblings or herself.
There are no perpetrators or victims in the telling of this story. Instead, we see how family members collude with each other to keep the wheels going round and around. Until one person steps out of the cycle, breaking the pattern for everyone in the family.
I was inspired by this book to look at my own upbringing with eyes as generous as Mary-Ellen modelled and for that I will always appreciate what this book offered me as a reader.
Many readers may have had their own difficult circumstances while growing up. Because really, who hasn’t? So many of us survived and arrived into our adult life, albeit in varying degrees of health and stability. But how many of us have done so without blaming others, especially our parents?
What I loved most about this book was how the author held a steady course throughout her upbringing and into her adult life. Nothing fancy, not chasing any big dreams, not wanting more but being present and to the best of her ability being loving – in the life that she was born to live. Some may have looked back at a life such as hers and been bitter, wanted more, felt hard-done by but not Mary-Ellen Bidner. By being true to her inner heart, she found the guidance that she needed in the teachings of the Ageless Wisdom, one step after another.
How she found her way to living magnificently is woven so subtlety into the book it would be easy to overlook those significant steps. In truth, those steps are something to be celebrated by all of us.
Filed under
