When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body
accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among
the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.
– Mary Oliver, August
…the notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies…
There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
~Robert Haas from “Meditation at Lagunitas”
This was one of those perfect days in late summer where the spirit of autumn takes a first stealing flight, like a spy, through the ripening country-side, and, with feigned sympathy for those who droop with August heat, puts her cool cloak of bracing air about leaf and flower and human shoulders.
– Sarah Orne Jewett
“Dandelion wine.
The words were summer on the tongue.
The wine was summer caught and stoppered…
sealed away for opening on a January day
with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks…”
~Ray Bradbury from Dandelion Wine
Now is mid-January:
Summer is found in our dark root cellar–
in rows of canned fruit and
a pile of potatoes
Summer is found in our freezer–
containers of berries and dehydrated pears
alongside bags of pea pods, corn and beans.
Summer is found in our barn–
piles of hay bales to be opened
to release the smell, the sun, the sweat of a midsummer evening’s harvest.
This wasn’t just plain terrible,
this was fancy terrible.
This was terrible with raisins in it.
~Dorothy Parker
More and more of my clinic time is devoted to evaluation and treatment of depression and anxiety rather than sore throats, coughs, UTIs and sprains/strains. An outbreak of overwhelming misery is climbing to epidemic proportions in our society. A majority of the patients who are coming in for mental health assessment are at the point where their symptoms are interfering with nearly every aspect of their daily activities and they can no longer cope. Their relationships are disintegrating, their work/school responsibilities are suffering, they are alarmingly self-medicating with alcohol, marijuana and pornography or whatever seems to give momentary relief. Suicidal ideation has become common, almost normative, certainly no longer rare.
Things seem terrible. And not just plain terrible. First-world-problem-terrible with raisins in it.
We have lost all perspective about terrible.
Terrible is what happened to the Philippine people in the midst of the most horrific typhoon this month –losing everything from their lives to shelter to any means to stay warm, fed and secure, much less find medical care.
Terrible is what happens in numerous countries where political oppression sends refugees across hundreds of miles and borders to seek asylum in foreign lands.
Terrible is what happens when hundreds of thousands are dying from AIDs, leaving behind their infected orphans to fend for themselves and care for each other.
Terrible is trafficking of human beings for power, gratification and money.
There is plenty of just plain terrible and most of us have no clue what it feels like. We are so absorbed in our own scratches from the ubiquitous thorns of life, grousing about the raisins that pop up in our own version of terrible, oblivious to the relative comfort with which we are graced daily compared to most of the world’s population.
Sometimes I think the best treatment for anxiety and depression has little to do with correcting brain chemistry or getting to the right cognitive behavioral insights to beat back negative thoughts, but rather to spend a year digging wells and latrines for those who have never used one. It is spending hours caring for the detoxing or the dying to see what misery really looks like. It is understanding how the fight for basic survival after an earthquake, a hurricane, a typhoon, a flood, a tsunami, makes life even more precious, rather than thrown away as if it is something you can simply upgrade or exchange for a new version.
Maybe, just maybe, when we reach in deeply, even sustaining the scars that come with everyday living, we can look past the thorns to the fruit. We may bleed getting to it. Maybe then the raisins don’t seem quite so terrible after all.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
~T.S. Eliot from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
When I was young, fog felt oppressive, as mournful as the fog horns sounding continually in the nearby bay.
Now in late middle age, I appreciate fog for slowing me down when life compels me to rush too fast.
When forced to take time, I begin to notice what I missed before:
clouds descend to hug and kiss the ground to bejewel everything they touch.
Today the dead and dying became glorious in subtle beauty,
the farm became all gossamer garland and transparent pearls…
photo by Nate GibsonWe live in the middle of bountiful berries this time of year just as sweet cherries are disappearing from the orchard. Strawberries just finished a few weeks ago, raspberries have been strong for almost three weeks and the blueberries are hanging in heavy branch-busting clusters begging for relief. Domesticated marion blackberries are already in the berry stands, but the evergreen and Himalaya wild blackberries are about two weeks from harvesting. Local currants are shiny and glistening. There are a few cranberry bogs in the area too, but they have weeks to go before they are ripe. It is truly a miracle to live within a few miles of all this lovely fruit, with most of them growing in our own back yard.
There are still wild strawberries in close-to-the-ground crawling vines with little thimble shaped berries with a slightly tart taste, far more interesting than the standard sweet juice laden market strawberry. Orange huckleberries grow wild in the low lands, and purple huckleberries are happiest up in the foothills, a great treasure find for hikers. Most highly prized, however, are the sweet tiny wild blackberries that are ripening on gentle winding vines right now at the edges of the woods and fences, as well as in roadside ditches or around tree stumps. They command huge prices per pound because it takes such effort to find and pick them.
As a child of the Pacific Northwest, growing up on a farm with woodlands and meadows with both wild and domesticated berry bushes, this was simply part of summer as I knew it. I watched the blossoms, then the forming fruit, then watched as the color would get just right, waiting to pick until the precise moment of ripeness before the birds would beat me to it. I also picked in the local fields as a summer job, including wild blackberries from our own woods, for 3 cents a pound. For the sweet wild blackberries, a yield of 75 cents was an exceptionally great day.
I preferred blueberry picking most of all. When I put a blueberry in my mouth, I transport back to those summer days that started at 6 AM, walking down the road to the neighbor’s, to their low pungent smelling peat ground converted from swamp to productive berry farm before the legislation that now prevents messing with wetlands. The bushes were tall, towering over my head, providing shade in the hot sweaty July sun. The berry clusters were easy to find, there were no thorns to shred sleeves and skin, and the berries made a very satisfying *plink* when they hit the empty pail. They didn’t smush, or bruise, and didn’t harbor many bees, spider webs or ugly bugs. They were refreshingly sweet and rejuvenating when a quick snack was in order. I wasn’t even aware, as I am now, that blueberries contain anthocyanins and other antioxidant chemicals believed to be helpful in preventing the growth of cancer cells. In short, blueberries were perfect then, and they are perfect now.
There are now so many blueberry fields, the local market is flooded and the price per pound has dropped considerably. A few years ago one farmer put a full page ad in the local newspaper today, begging the public to come pick his ripe blueberries at 99 cents a pound, just to get them off his bushes. I stopped by another farm’s roadside stand and chatted with the Sikh owner and his three young sons as they measured out my 5 pounds of luscious blueberries. He was philosophical about the low prices, explaining he was a patient man, and the bushes would yield blue gold for him for a very long time, even if some years will be low price years.
As a fellow farmer, I appreciated his willingness to hold out through the rough times. He beamed with pride about the perfection of his crop, plentiful as it was. My tastebuds agree: this was the perfect berry 48 years ago in my backyard, and some things thankfully never change.
But then perfection can come in many colors…
The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.
~George Santayana
Our hilltop farm is named BriarCroft for good reason — our unintentional crop that flourishes each year is thorny. We battle them with brush hogs, mowers and loppers, even burning them to the roots when necessary. Yet the vines win this battle when we divert our attention elsewhere, even for just a few weeks.
Good thing there is light and love that glints through the thorns to encourage us when we are torn and hurting. There will be a time when the power of the spirit will overwhelm and overcome the plethora of thorns. There will come a day when the vines will yield fruit to feed us rather than wounds to bleed us.
There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.
— J.R.R. Tolkien
“O cruel cloudless space,
And pale bare ground where the poor infant lies!
Why do we feel restored
As in a sacramental place?
Here Mystery is artifice
And here a vision of such peace is stored,
Healing flows from it through our eyes.”
~May Sarton from Nativity
“I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember.
‘We are nearer to Spring
Than we were in September,’
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.”
– Oliver Herford, I Heard a Bird Sing
“Come, come thou bleak December wind,
And blow the dry leaves from the tree!
Flash, like a Love-thought, thro’me, Death
And take a Life that wearies me.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1772-1834, Fragment 3
“That’s no December sky!
Surely ’tis June
Holds now her state on high
Queen of the noon.
Only the tree-tops bare
Crowning the hill,
Clear-cut in perfect air,
Warn us that still
Winter, the aged chief,
Mighty in power,
Exiles the tender leaf,
Exiles the flower.”
– Robert Fuller Murray (1863-1894), A December Day
“This is what I have heard
at last the wind in December
lashing the old trees with rain
unseen rain racing along the tiles
under the moon
wind rising and falling
wind with many clouds
trees in the night wind.”
– W. S. Merwin
“The grim frost is at hand, when apples will fall thick, almost thunderous, on the hardened earth.”
– D. H. Lawrence
“Give me the end of the year an’ its fun
When most of the plannin’ an’ toilin’ is done;
Bring all the wanderers home to the nest,
Let me sit down with the ones I love best,
Hear the old voices still ringin’ with song,
See the old faces unblemished by wrong,
See the old table with all of its chairs
An’ I’ll put soul in my thanksgivin’ prayers.”
– Edgar A. Guest
“Through bare trees
I can see all the rickety lean-tos
and sheds, and the outhouse
with the half-moon on the door,
once modestly covered in
summer’s greenery.
Through bare trees
I can watch the hawk
perched on a distant branch,
black silhouetted wings
shaking feathers and snow,
and so can its prey.
Through bare trees
I can be winter’s innocence,
unashamed needfulness,
the thin and reaching limbs
of a beggar, longing to touch
but the hem of the sun.”
– Lisa Lindsey, Bare Trees
“There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you ….. In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.”
– Ruth Stout
Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson
Just like a certain recent U.S. President, my father chose to relax by brush cutting. Later on in life he enjoyed the still peace and quiet of fishing, but when I was young, his favorite thing to do when he had extra time was to grab his brush hook from the garage, sling it over his shoulder, and head out into our woods. There he would spend hours whacking away at the undergrowth of a lush Pacific Northwest forest, creating open areas for our cows to graze and making trails through seemingly impenetrable trees, foliage and blackberry patches.
Making trails seemed to give him a sense of control and accomplishment that he rarely felt in his government desk job. It created huge “brush piles” which became controlled bonfires on “burn” days in late October, reducing to ashes what once had been an impassable mess.
Somehow I found and married a man who also enjoys clearing brush, using that same sixty year old brush hook handle that now bears the sweat marks of two beloved men in my life.
The path for me is clearer after their work is done. I can now find my way.
Barnstorming 