Thursday, Sally asked me if I would pick some blackberries. There's a good sized patch on the southside of the garden, so I started there. The berries are many and many look ripe but so resisted my efforts to remove them that I knew they need more time. Nonetheless I spent several hours combing those bushes, and the vast patches down by the workshop and the pond, and I finally got about two and half pints.
What I like about work practice is how it lets you see your mind in action. So, for example, blackberries are even more finicky than raspberries--tug a little too hard at that fat purple berry, let your desire to fill that bowl quickly take charge, and you end up with bowlful of sour berries. I had to really see that desire (and taste it) before I could resist it.
The more I picked the more it seemed that the really ripe berries were just out of reach, high overhead and deep in the thorny patch, and I schemed and schemed to reach those only to discover, once again, that the blackberries are just not quite ripe, and only one in ten was ready to surrender to my hands.
About lunch time I myself surrendered--to the heat, the belly's hunger, the fact that July is not ripe for blackberries, and so I stopped trying to exceed my own reach and went back up to the house. I knocked at the kitchen door crying out, "special delivery for David." Someone came and took the berries from me. As I walked down the stairs I could hear the cooks exclaiming over their beauty and I felt a little pride appear. But I didn't grow them, I reminded myself, the sun and the rain and the earth and the air grew them, with a little help from the bees.
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