Raspberry Picking

My son and I found them halfway up the abandoned road, dangerously juicy. We eased the berries gently from their white posts and thumped them into the bowl in his lap, and fingered some squishy berries into my mouth, the first burst of tart sweet juice giving way to tiny seeds pressed between the teeth. As we slowly gorged our appetites, I thought about bears. I wondered how a  bear could feed itself eating berries. Did it take them off with its mouth or with its paw, eat the whole bush or neatly remove single berries? And how many berries would it take? And mightn't the expenditure of energy required to pick a single berry equal the caloric count of each, leaving the bear just as hungry as when he began? Or maybe they could pick together, one bear eating and lounging while the other toils, and they trade off so that each bear gets fed every other day. Red juice stained our fingers, my son's mouth, my pants. We picked another bowlful. By this time we had berry vision. The road and forest hung with red lobes larger than coins.

--Daniel Bacchuber

Sometimes I go through periods of time where one word comes back to me over and over, often unbidden and other times invoked. Recently it’s been the word ‘softening.’ It’s a mantra of sorts. I use it, when I think to, to peel back the hardening crust that can begin to try to shore my heart up when I’m tired, sad, lonesome, or angry. This election season has been a time of stark contrasts for me; there have been moments of real anger as I’ve considered yanking my smallish inheritance out of AIG hands and off the stock market, incurring a steep penalty and doing just what you’re not supposed to do in a time of financial crisis. I don’t want to walk around with the feeling that I’m making things worse, though, and I don’t really depend on credit for anything at all other than my mortgage, so I’m all right. That’s a position of strength, and I’m grateful for it. I can move away from the resentment that I feel sometimes towards those pampered AIG executives at their hugely expensive spa retreat. Then too I have experienced feelings of relief, of peace and well-being, amidst the storm of commentary and supposition surrounding the election and the financial crisis. As Dawn, Jeannie, and others have recently written, it may be incredibly healthy and enlightening for our country to have to learn to live within its means. And to paraphrase what Maze has said, it looks like we’re being forced into greater simplicity. I’m all right with that. Sometimes it has to happen that way. And it does have an oddly softening effect on my heart. This past Friday morning I was walking into a store to buy some juice for my students and for some reason this word “softening” came into my head. Then my eye caught the nearby Atlanta newspaper with the headline “Congress softening towards bailout bill.” It seems like this sort of linguistic synchronicity, though minor, happens to me a lot, and it’s reassuring, grounding somehow, even though I have strongly mixed feelings about the bill. As I was paying for the juice and Jolly Ranchers I bought, the clerk asked me about my bag, which is fair trade Guatemalan, and then told me a wild story of having been trapped in a movie theatre in Bolivia during an earthquake. She was eager to tell her story and clearly wanted to go on talking about her adventures in Central and South America but I had to go. When I got to my car, a youngish fellow with a scruffy little blond beard and a baseball cap was standing between his old pickup truck and my little Honda, which was sporting a new Obama-Biden sticker on its bumper. He seemed perplexed, almost lost. Confused. But he had a kind face. I said to him, conspiratorially, “You know, I worry a little about that thing sometimes,” as if he stood outside any potential pool of those I might be worried about, as if he was, well, safe. He gave me a warm grin and said something like, ah, you’ll be all right, and drove away. I’m still trying to come up with a word to describe his demeanour as he stood there. He didn’t seem angry. Curious, like I knew something he didn’t, and maybe if he looked hard enough he’d see it. Softening. (Ripening?) If that was true, I hope maybe he did see it, at least a little.

Whatever the Universe does, small or large, through any being or communion of beings, which helps further its purpose, this act celebrates the Source of our unfolding story. The essence of all praiseworthy qualities constantly returns to the One Being. Give praise and celebrate! This Being of beings mysteriously nurtures and sustains, grows and brings to maturity all worlds, universes and pluriverses, all aspects of consciousness and knowledge, all storylines and lesson plans. This Source is the Original Womb of Love in all its aspects. It says 'I can' on the day when all elements part company and return home, when the threads of interweaving destiny unravel and the invoices come due. This Universe Being accepts the mission to resolve the unresolvable at the time when time ends just as it said 'yes' to the birth movements which began it. Cutting through all distractions, addictions and diversions, all conflicting taboos, theologies, offenses and misunderstandings, we will act only from this Universe Purpose, we will develop abilities only in service to the Real, we will bow to and venerate only the deepest Source of all Life and we will only expect help from this direction, the ration of what we need, freely given by the One. We ask you to reveal our next harmonious step. Show us the path which says, "stand up, get going, do it!" which resurrects us from the the slumber of the drugged and leads to the consummation of Heart's desire, like all the stars and galaxies in tune, in time, straight on. The orbit of every being in the universe is filled with delight. When each travels consciously, a sigh of wonder arises at the expanse, the abundance. This is not the path of frustration, anger or annoyance, which only happens when we temporarily lose the way and become drained, roaming too far from the Wellspring of Love. --Surah Fateha text/translation by Neil Douglas-Klotz, from Desert Wisdom: Sacred Middle Eastern Writings from the Goddess to the Sufis

Where did the truth go? The key was mislaid in an army of doors, it was there on its ring with the others, but the lock is nowhere in the world. No world for the key to get lost in, no true or false, in the end.

---Pablo Neruda

I found this poem on the Gratefulness website's poetry page. The photograph is of Talking Rock Creek.

Vigils: The Night Watch

Dazzling, even under glass, the sky's blue plate special shimmers
up from the creek bed, enticing a lunchtime crowd of floaters and fly-by-nights
to make their rest stop here. Lost in reflection, a pair of rocks idle in the shallows, undisturbed
by the honking and jostling as the ducks file downstream, dodging the water's bones
as easily as bedroom slippers
navigate the dark.

This is what I do not understand: how all this happens
without an answer. Without, even, a question.

The Wissahickon spills endlessly, like the night love poured through me, nearly, I thought,
uncontainable as it rushed from my fingers and out the window into people passing on the street,
over fire hydrants, pigeons, and boom boxes, through police cars, stop signs, and cockroaches,
between two dogs circling in heat. I did not need an answer then.
I would have understood the indifferent delight of the ducks. But I asked,
and my question scattered like mercury, into a million trembling globules
magnetic with yearning.

-- Deidra Greenleaf Allan

http://www.gratefulness.org/