Mulberry Meditation

Last night I picked mulberries while my husband watched our son and dogs. My mind wandered here and there and then came back to picking berries. I thought, this is a meditation. I heard the birds and the traffic and brought myself back to berry picking. I wondered how my guys were doing and came back to berry picking. I stopped to take pictures of the fruit and the insects, and came back to berry picking. I wondered if we were going to get a storm, and brought my mind back to berry picking.

One of the insects I found was a newly hatched grasshopper. He was such a pale, translucent green that his features were unrecognizable from a distance and the camera had a hard time picking him up. I would have missed him if I hadn't picked berries.

I have a problem with holding my breath. I think I always have. I carry a baseline level of stress that makes me stop several times a day and have to start breathing. Even with this pleasant task of berry picking I found myself having to unclench my chest and begin breathing again. I think I need more nights of berry picking.

I wondered why people wanted to get away from picking their own food and got jobs elsewhere. City life and working in an office is something I have grown to hate. I would rather be able to pick berries and can tomatoes and harvest potatoes, but I cannot, and others gave that up in the past. Then I thought, they must have needed to because of drought and insects and the like. If everyone around you looses their crops for a season or worse, several seasons, you start to go hungry. So the first people to leave the farm-life probably had no choice and now every farmer needs to have a second stream of income. Of course later, after I went into the house, I remembered the stock-market crash and the dustbowl and thought, "duh!" I really should remember my history.

The birds were singing so beautifully that I said to myself, "I wish I had a tape recorder. That dates me doesn't it? What do they call recorders now? Is it a MP3 recorder? Of course the traffic's so loud I wouldn't be able to just record the birds." I returned to picking and tried to stay present and "in the moment" but the mosquitoes got worse and I decided insects were the reason people stopped farming and I kept wondering what time it was and if it was time to give my son a bath yet, and the clouds were fast and dark and I figured I would get rained on before long, so inside I went. But I want to go back. I want to do something like this every day. I want to capture a piece of what our great-grandparents had to give up.