Ronald Jorgensen

(Ron, 1978:) “While I was washing my supper utensils in the Matrimandir Workers' Camp someone in the kitchen asked if I wanted to see the first tomatoes harvested from the new farm, their own grown food. Yes, but not out of ordinary interest. Having already heard a description of them that could overexert your belief, I wanted to see the maybe more modest reality. It is true these tomatoes were known to be raised in a different way than most, not only in farming technique but in the attentiveness of the young couple who cultivated them. Still they couldn't be so dramatically different: tomatoes are only tomatoes.
         Angela brought them out on a circular tray. For an instant I flashed inside, “They must be some other fruit”; the normal flaws people have come to accept as natural were gone. Instead of rutted skin-rupture cracks splaying out from the stem, rangy difference of size and shape, an uneven mottling of colour and those bruises usually found only in the ripe spots, these fruits were all somewhat small and solid perfect spheres profoundly charged with an orange-glowing red, and with tiny collars of jungle-green leaves breathfully surrounding the stems.
         I must have stood a long time looking. There was more life and flavour in simply watching them than ever in picking and eating others fresh from the vine. Not just more, different: a verve so penetrating it has changed the essence of tomatoes for me.
         “Would you like to taste one?” During the first small and respectful bite I saw that peerless colour go all the way down through the packed flesh and then the taste came: sharp and sweet, brimming and deft – marrying in a rich saturation of the tongue. A light, green energy flowed in with it. There was no lapse between the sight, taste and flow. (The next morning, its rasa was still fresh in me.) So this is a tomato.
         If this is a tomato, what is a mango? Or a farm, an education, industry, city of the future? Something has happened in Matter on Auroville land. As small a step as it might be, I am sure it has happened.
         ...
         I feel certain much of Auroville is waiting to manifest the way that tomato did... thousands of objects, buildings, living things, cultural forms, ideas, communities, each thirsting for a meeting with some person whose full consciousness goes out, offering, in sustained purifying work, shedding possession of results until the correspondence is made and the relation brings forth the authentic character behind its old mundane veil... Ah, that's what you are! Everything is ready. Waiting.”

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