Oh Agora

Yesterday, I battled with weather-induced blues (which ought to be called greys), and only truly found resolution when I went to the green market.
Just a minute of walking through the even now-coloured isles (amid the glow of acorn) brought me into a narrative connected to the soil, photosynthesis, modest farmers and vegetable sellers. I asked one grandma how much she was selling broccoli for - and it was the same price as before, though the broccoli bunch had dwindled to one third its earlier size. She said that the ground was closing up, that less was growing now.
This is the picture that explained my mood: the ground is closing up. No more growth. No more yield. It brought to mind an image of Orpheus, and in my mind, he was beneath the winter ground that had closed up, trapped there, in such a Hades, a place of no growth or opportunity, somehow having penetrated the frozen soil. But there is always opportunity for growth, Hades is the wrong state of mind or heart.
In winter, the peasants knit, some even write poetry or paint "naive paintings".
What is universal is that this is a time of change (for those hemispheres now entering winter).
Going back to the market, I saw those crates of apples and purple kale, all signs of the food to come, carrots, more acorn. I bought a giant piece of the latter: here acorns grow to incredible proportions, so that one must saw away at them at home in order to expedite cooking time in the oven.
As I made my way out of the market, my eye catching a display of random metal odds an ends at one stall, I thought of Socrates, and how he would spend time at the agora, and wondered what it was like (how, exactly, did people gather?). I know it wasn't a market, the market was elsewhere. Still, I think the gathering place we have that closest resembles the agora would have to be the market. People discuss politics at the market, perhaps not in long sermons, but axiomatically. The market seems to me to be a much more natural place to discuss ideas than in the Academy. Even the Chinese tea houses, where men would go, some with their songbirds in lacquered cages, to eat dimsum and talk politics, though not even these exist as they once did, seem more vital than the classroom.
There is also something to be said about talking to those people who are willing to listen, which is what Socrates did, and what happens at the market. Perhaps the market and Socrates are connected in my mind because they represent to me Primary Units of an idea: the construct is left to the imagination. They are a cornerstone that breaks poor narrative, leading to better narrative.