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My garden needs my attention, and I really will get to it shortly. I just have a few dishes to stack in the dishwasher, and a shopping list to write out. Oh, and I haven't filled the bird feeder for a bit, nor the hummingbird feeder, And that reminds me, I should add some sweetener to my shopping list. What's the name of that stuff she told me about? Then it'll definitely be the garden.

You know the procrastination perambulation. You wander around the house, noticing what should get done, avoiding looking too closely into the laundry hamper, loading the dishwasher, promising yourself you really are going to start giving stuff away, maybe even putting a few things you've recently shrunk out of into a bag, rambling on with one phrase after another in a sentence that knows if you ever end it you'll have to actually put on a coat and get the pruners and a shovel and go out and — wait a bit; it looks like rain out there. OK, tomorrow for sure.

My garden, tended to or ignored, still marks the leisurely passage of seasons. It will forgive my procrastination and wait until even I cannot tolerate looking out at its overgrown, composting wreckage, and put down my tea and do it. Half an hour or so and we'll be winter ready, and we both - garden and gardener - can relax for another few months. Time is an artifact: a whip for the guilty, an incentive for the hesitant.

I've thought about time more often now as my own tme here shortens, and as that very statement gives evidence. There has always been, for many of us, the sense of living at the end of history, as fallacious as that is. I think my life span has seen so many marvelous inventions, witnessed so many catastrophic events, survived so many diseases and malicious designs. Yet a citizen of Rome or Renaissance Europe might have felt the same. My time has been unique in its particulars, unremarkable in its generalities. Peace and war, wealth and poverty, abundance and famine, health and pestilence are with us as they have always been, varying only in the numbers.

Of course, the emergencies confronting us all at this point in our human cycle may not be resolvable. We may be underpopulated enough that we extinguish ourselves even as we have extinguished so many other life forms. An AI may be developed with a super intelligence which, by that very definition, will be beyond our control. The doomsday clock predicting our self-immolation in a nuclear holocaust stands at 85 seconds to midnight. You want me to get back to my garden, don't you.

That's what the author of Ecclesiastes did - went to the garden for the primary metaphor in saying, "To every thing there is a season." Oh, she rattled on about living and dying, but the main item was farming with its clearing of land and harvesting. Maybe that's where we got off on the wrong shovel full - gardening - or to generalize to its mega-metaphor, agriculture.

I'm rereading the novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. After I read it the first time back in the 90s, I scrounged 25 or so copies and used it as a novel study with my grade 12 English class. One of the two main characters is a sentient, telepathic gorilla who has very definite views on agriculture as practised by homo sapiens - negative views they were but only for one particular branch of homo sapiens.

I think the terms "takers" and"leavers" came from Quinn's book. The takers were the humans who acted out the Genesis story in the belief that they were required to assert "dominion" over "all the earth". Eventually of course, the takers settled down in established farms to become the agriculturalists and pasturalists and then the workers and elites in cities and empires to eradicate everything that couldn't be eaten and assert dominion over all the other homo species, usually after convincing themselves that those others weren't really very sapient. And that process became the rule - not written down anywhere - to be enacted over and over as empires rose and fell.

The leavers, who were mostly hunter-gatherer clans, were reduced to tribes living in marginalized areas of the continents. I don't think Quinn, through his protagonist Ishmael, bestowed any glorification of "noble savage" stereotypes on his leavers, and recent history shows us that given the right tools for the job, such as high-powered rifles and bottom-trawling fish boats, those marginalized peoples can hunt and fish themselves toward extinction along with the worst of us. And this isn't a two-paragraph anthropological study of humankind, because I don't have the  credentials for that. Just reporting on an interesting perspective. Here's some more by way of historical-mythological advice.

If a male ruler had 100 wives, how many children could potentially be born every year? OK, that was easy because historical advice is on the side of our textbooks.

Now, if a female ruler had 100 husbands, how many children could potentially be born every year? I know the answer isn't difficult, but are you struggling with the concept? I did too. Put it down to my sex conditioning. And I'm pretty liberal. So was Ishmael, but on the path of the Socratic dialogue used in teaching his acolyte "how things turned out the way they have with species extinction facing us "(and the book was published in the 1990s) there were some simple equations with disastrous answers proposed.

And since we're on the topic of time and gardening, or time and technology, let me introduce two graphs and two definitions. If it reminds you of a high school math class, remember how mathematically illiterate I am and be consoled that you will have no problem understanding the concepts.

An arithmetic progression is one in which each step is of the same magnitude and direction as the preceding one, and if progress proceeds in an arithmetic form, the future will unfold fairly predictably. But it doesn't. Instead we get a geometric or exponential progression where each step is determined by multiplying the preceding one by a fixed number.

Here it is in a line:

arithmetic progression  2,  4,  6,  8,  10,  etc. (step up by twosies)

geometric progression 2,  4,   8,  16,  32  etc  (step up by X2)

And here is how it looks on a graph