Countering my posts on garbage: Mulberries!
Last week I posted a few posts on garbage in Washington Square Park and how not to lose hope. Today, I’m sharing about one of the best parts of nature.
Yesterday I took the PATH train to New Jersey, to my secret mulberry trees, to pick mulberries for the first time this season. I already went to town on Juneberries last month. I can walk to enough juneberry trees to pick more than I can eat.
The mulberries were abundant and ripe. Words cannot describe how sweet and flavorful they taste. They burst in your mouth with flavor that tastes like pure sunshine. Some white ones taste like raw honey. I can’t believe people eat candy when such things exist. Eating candy is like an insult to berries and all of nature. It shows ignorance of how much more flavor, nuance, complexity, and everything else something healthy from nature provides.
They’ll keep ripening another couple weeks, so I’ll head out again later this week or this weekend.
Like a Child
Picking berries makes me feel like a kid again, searching among the branches and leaves for the biggest, juiciest, ripest berries, deciding which to eat and which to save. The pictures show how many I brought home, less the ones I ate already and share with my doorman. I probably ate half as many more while picking because how can I help it? Why wouldn’t I? They’re healthy! I enjoy them with abandon, as a kid can enjoy life.
I’ll leave you with the question: when adults feel like kids again, are we accessing something we lost to age or was it always still accessible but in our world we suppress or abandon that part of us in favor of being a productive unit in society?
Like a King
Picking berries also makes me feel like a king. No matter what resources he or she can access, no monarch or emperor could get anything that tastes better or is fresher than berries picked from a tree and eaten on the spot.
Once the trees are abundant beyond what I can enjoy, no amount of wealth can produce more than I can eat.
Imagine: people used to eat like this all the time. We think we live in abundance, but hunter-gatherers experience more abundance. We overproduce doof, which makes food all the more desirable, since unlike doof, food tastes delicious.
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