The blackberries are ripe again. It is a good time of year to be alive. Such sweetness. I pull them off the bushes one by one and eat them, still warm from the sun. Organic before we were told what “organic” was. Good for you before we were “educated” about them being an “antioxidant superfood.” Just plain old berries that grow along the side of the road every year. Or out in the meadows. Or down by the river. Or wherever a bird happened to drop a seed the year before. Kissed by the sun, so they must be special.
They’re free but there’s still a price to pay, of course, as there always is for everything. With blackberries, it’s the confounded thorns. The large ones gash your skin, and you can avoid most of them if you pay attention. But the small ones you can barely see are like fine little razors that tear tiny imperceptible cuts on your hands and forearms and legs. You don’t notice it until you get into water later on and each tiny cut comes alive like an exquisitely tiny fire. Ah, the price, you laugh to yourself, yes, the price. But the fire is worth it.
At one point I stop and look up at the top of the trees as the wind is rustling the leaves. I am instantly transported in my mind to a moment when I was a child riding in the back seat of a car with my siblings, my parents in the front seat now and then telling us to keep it down to a dull roar. We were always loud. Something about the sunshine then looks the same as today, the Light catching in just that certain way. We’ll be home soon, I thought, as I drank in every detail of my surroundings. What will mother make for supper?
Then back to the river and now, and it occurs to me that I have glimpsed a bit of reality. Somehow it has leaked again. There was a realness I felt when I was younger that I don’t always feel now, but I search for it continually. Longingly. Because I know something is wrong. My eyes tear over a bit, but I don’t want anyone to see. So I keep picking berries, focusing intently on one bush away from the others so they won’t see the leak. The fissure. The crack in my soul. The distant reality still glazing my eyes.
Something has changed in the world, and I know that you know this. I know you feel it. I know your eyes glaze over with tears and you try to hide them. I know there’s a sunny day in your memory, when the leaves were blowing in the wind and rustling together and talking. When the birds were singing and the insects were humming. And life was slower. And you were almost home, where the sheets were hanging on the clothesline, dry and ready to be taken in, the beds made and infused with the sweet scent of the outdoors. To which you would fall asleep later on and wake up and do it all again the next day.
I have said it before and I will say it again: Spend too much time looking at the black mirror, abounding with hypnotic pixels, and you will lose sight of the unpixelated real world. Dots on a screen. Words typed to someone who may not even be there, who may never have been there. Ever. “How beautiful you are and how pleasant, my love, with such delights!” said Solomon the wise. What song might he have sung for the black mirror?
There is a knowing. There is a great willing that can be heard if you listen closely. Those of you who are awake know of what I speak. You know the difference between the outdoors and face-to-face contact with people as compared to the pixels in the black mirror, however hypnotic they may be. You see people fighting about things that don’t exist, about situations that are not real. You see the created un-world. Misshapen like a patched-together being in a Tolkien novel, groveling to the all-seeing eye in the mountain.
I would say just simply turn it off, simply go outside. And while I think this is a good first step, I don’t think it is enough anymore. The ties that bind are like the old Chinese finger traps we played with as children. The more you pull, the tighter the snare becomes. Something more is needed.
A shift. A shift in consciousness. There are two worlds now, and they are superimposed upon one another. But slowly, ever so slowly, they are drifting apart. It used to be easy to travel from one world to the other and back again. It is not so easy now because they are drifting further and further apart. Someday it will be impossible to travel between them, and I fear that day is coming soon. Then we will be stuck in whatever world we were in when the parting became final, and never the twain shall meet.
There is a patch of berries down by the river, where the thorns mercilessly cut your hands and arms. And the berries….they carry the Sun within them, who enters you as you consume them. Upon which a thousand tiny points of Light stream out of you from every wound you have ever had. It is good. The pain of reality is a good thing, and the price is definitely worth it.
