Category: Reflection

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Value and identity

A perfect spinach seedling.

The other morning, I was reading the beautiful passage Philippians 2:1-11 about how Christ:

did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.

However, I got a bit stuck on the words ‘in humility regard others as better than yourselves’. As someone who tends towards low self-esteem, it’s not very helpful to hear this. My default position is to feel inferior to other people, but this has nothing to do with humility and everything to do with an unhealthy place in my being. How can I regard other people as ‘better’ than myself in a way that isn’t damaging?

The writer of Philippians also says ‘let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus’. Christ knew who he was, and whose he was, he knew his value and his identity. From this secure place, he was able to give everything up and serve others, even to the point of death.

Having good self-worth isn’t about dragging other people down in my mind or pushing myself up above them; it has nothing to do with comparison. It’s about my, and everyone else’s, intrinsic value as earth-creatures loved by God.

I need to keep connecting with that part of me that knows my value and identity, so that I can act from a sense of inner security and confidence, rather than stumbling down the well-trodden path to self-effacement. From that safe place, I can make a genuinely humble choice to take the last place without feeling devalued or that I’d have no right to the first place, were I to decide to take it.

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Detachment and the rich young ruler

Amethyst deceivers + puff balls, autumn chanterelles + hedgehog mushrooms, and inkcaps, collected in a nearby forest.

This is a reflection I wrote in May this year on Mark 10:17-22

I wonder how you feel about this passage? I know that this is one of those difficult encounters with Jesus that we cannot ignore, but that can leave us feeling rather uncomfortable. In this story, Jesus seems very demanding – he asks the rich man to sell all his possessions and give the proceeds to the poor, is he asking the same of us? Since only a few actually take that path, does this mean that the rest of us are failing in our Christian vocation?

How we read these words depends on our image of God, what we really believe God is like. If he is punitive, demanding and a killjoy, then the message we hear is that we must try and earn God’s love by doing difficult things and denying ourselves. However, in this passage, we read that Jesus looked at the rich man and loved him. The Bible is peppered with verses that tell us how much God loves us and wants what’s best for us, and so this reading can’t be about doing hard things to earn God’s love – that love is already given. If we can believe that God is love and has our best interests at heart, then this passage has another message for us.

Let’s take a moment to consider what was going on in the rich man’s life. He was deeply religious and conscientiously followed the religious laws. He worked hard at doing the right thing and was committed to seeking eternal life, what we might call ‘salvation’. He sensed that there was something more to the spiritual life, but seemed to have come to the end of this resources. He had heard that the Rabbi Jesus had come to town – perhaps he could show him the way? Since he was a wealthy man, he could be fairly confident that he was on the right track, because wealth was understood as a reward from God for good behaviour. So he was hopeful, looking forward to a positive interaction with this teacher who would surely recognise his virtue. He believed himself willing to do whatever was required of him in the search for God. So, in his enthusiasm, he ran to Jesus and knelt down before him, asking the question, ‘What can I do to be saved?’ Now, there are two problematic words in this question, I and do. He believed he needed to work at getting God to accept him, and believed that he effectively could save himself this way. The focus was squarely on him and what he could do.

Jesus initially appears to go along with this assumption, listing various laws that must be kept – as if that was all that was needed – perhaps this was his way to find out how serious the rich man was. Only when pressed by this earnest young man, does Jesus give his unthinkable instruction to sell what he owns, and give the money to the poor.

his wealth was a blessing from God, it made no sense to give it all up – that would be like ungratefully returning a gift to the one who gave it, and so the rich man reacted with shock and grief. He was, perhaps, looking for a new way of praying or another religious practise, but Jesus didn’t tell him to take something new on, but to let go of what he already had. Jesus made it sound easy, but it wasn’t, and wasn’t just about the money, Jesus was also asking him to give up his status, security and even his family, as there’s no way that his relatives would have remained in contact with him if he had embraced a life of poverty.

It makes me think of Jesus’ words in John 12, where he says:

24 Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. 25 Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

Jesus says what he does because he knows what the rich man really needs, he knows what will set him free and bring him abundant life. Giving up his wealth wouldn’t have earnt the rich man his salvation, as that is the gift of God, but it would have set him free to follow Jesus. The rich man’s life is under control, safe, he lives within comfortable limits. Jesus invites him beyond these limits, he challenges the rich man to let go of the control of his life and trust that God will catch him, but the rich man isn’t ready for that leap of faith. I also wonder whether Jesus asked the man to do the almost impossible partly to show him that he could not save himself?

Jesus’ challenge is followed by a promise and an invitation:

you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me

This invitation to ‘come follow me’ is the same as the invitation he extended to the first disciples. He called Andrew, Peter, James and John to leave their life as fishermen, but perhaps since they had less to lose it was easier for them to give up the little they had? But then Matthew left his job as a tax collector, which was a lucrative profession; in his case perhaps the fact that most people would have hated him for colluding with the occupying Romans, would have made him more willing to give it up that life? The man in our story is both rich and respectable, he has everything to lose and is too attached to his lifestyle and possessions to let go and follow Jesus. He doesn’t realise that his wealth has him trapped and is afraid of what would happen if he lost it. He isn’t free to pursue the deeper spiritual life that he desires.

Now, I just said that the rich man was too ‘attached’ to his wealth, and that was a deliberate choice of word. I want to say a just few words about the opposite: detachment. Unlike the rich man, the 12 disciples were sufficiently detached from their previous occupations to be able to leave them behind and follow Jesus. Ignatian spirituality understands detachment as a healthy impartiality, a distancing, an indifference. If we can be detached from things and habits, we are freer to choose those things and attitudes that lead to God. That isn’t to say that things are necessarily bad, quite the contrary, they can be a great blessing, but if they become too important to us, they entrap us and so hinder our growth towards God.

For the rich man, there was a call to be free from his possessions and a call to be free of the lie that there was something he could do to save himself. The rich man’s unhealthy attachments were brought to light by an encounter with Jesus; we can discover our unhealthy attachments by an encounter with the Holy Spirit.

These attachments can come in many guises, they might be material possessions or money, as in this passage, they might also be feelings and thoughts that bind us, cravings and addictions, or unhelpful thought patterns. For example, I struggle with an attachment to perfectionism. My tendency is to believe that if something I’ve done is not perfect, then it’s practically worthless. This puts the focus on me and my achievements, rather than on trusting God to use my, inevitably imperfect, efforts.

One way to test whether we are unhealthily attached to something, is to ask ourselves how we would feel if God asked us to let go of it. Our response will give us an indication of how attached we are, because, when we are free, letting go doesn’t feel difficult. Depending on what the attachment is, God may or may not ask us to let go of it, but we are invited to hold lightly even the good gifts in our lives.

The encounter in this story feels rather final. The rich man is presented with an ultimatum and declines Jesus’s invitation, albeit regretfully, as we read that he grieved as he walked away. I wonder whether the rich man might have changed his mind later on? Having had his unhealthy attachments revealed to him, perhaps, in time, he came to the point of being able to let go of them? After all, detaching from the things that keep us from a closer walk with God is a lifelong process.

To follow Jesus, the rich man needed to let go of his possessions. What are the things that limit our freedom to follow Christ? How might God be calling us into a more abundant life? Perhaps we can ask God to set us free to take risks with our time, talent and treasures for the purposes of God’s kingdom. I invite us to place all we are and have before God, giving thanks for all our blessings, and may God help us loosen our grip on whatever hinders us from serving him, confident that He won’t loosen his grip of love on us.

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Luke 12:11-12

Mushrooms on moss – how gorgeous!

When they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers, and the authorities, do not worry about how you are to defend yourselves or what you are to say; for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say. Luke 12:11-12

I used to believe this passage meant that when I was in a situation of great stress and difficulty, God would give me the perfect thing to say in a moment of divine inspiration. This, however, has not been my experience. When I feel under pressure, my mind goes entirely blank and I have absolutely nothing to say.

My evolving understanding of how God and I coexist gives me another way to understand this passage. I find I am most receptive to God when I am still and quiet, seeking that place of inner peace where the Holy Spirit dwells, or when I am on a walk in the forest or cycling somewhere (if I can stop ruminating over my never-ending to-do list and let my mind wander). At such times I am more able to tap into my God-given creativity; if I want the Holy Spirit to teach me what I ought to say, then I need to find a way to return to that place of inner connection, even when I am out and about in stressful situations.

I had a small example of that the other week. I took what was, for me, the bold step of agreeing to facilitate a peer-support group; this was the first time I had ever done anything quite like this and there were a lot of unknowns. At various points during the meeting, I felt myself becoming tense in my body and stressed in my mind about how best to respond – but I managed to catch myself doing it, so relaxed my body, took a few deep breaths and waited. The Holy Spirit did teach me what I ought to say, and it turned out that was very little, as the group pretty much ran itself 🤣.

Breathe.

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Does your bramble have thorns?

These are the first fruits of the apple and pear trees I planted five years ago – patience is a virtue!

I recently pruned my blackberry bushes. Dealing with the relatively young thornless cultivated plants was easy – I identified the canes that gave fruit this year and cut them down. Then I moved onto the blackberries that pre-dated my time in the area, in particular, a magnificent specimen beside the parking space that is particularly well-adapted to its chosen home.

Every year it puts out thick, long canes covered with vicious hooks that attack anyone who tries to get into the passenger side of the car, but, since it also produces an abundance of blackberries, it’s the passengers who have to make accommodations. This bramble is a tight tangle of canes, old and new, embracing each other in a self-preserving heap. Locating the right canes for removal is not trivial, and this year it involved me climbing right into the heart of the bush. By the end of my work, my arms and legs were ripped to shreds (I know I should have worn better clothing, but I was in too much of a rush…)

This got me to thinking. ‘Real’ blackberries, the way nature made them, are covered in thorns – this is normal. However, we don’t like the thorns, since they cause us discomfort and make collecting berries potentially painful, so we have bred varieties without them. I wonder about a parallel with modernity…

In the last hundred years or so, technological advances and cheap fuel have meant that we (in the global north) have been able to reduce our physical discomfort and pain to levels unprecedented in history. From advances in medicine and dentistry, to the invention of washing machines and cars, life in many ways has become much easier; and when we do start to feel discomfort, we have a plethora of ways to distract ourselves or numb the pain.

This is not a normal state of affairs; in most of the rest of the world, and throughout most of history, life is much harder, and it is certainly going to become increasingly difficult for everyone in the years and decades to come. In the face of threats of social, economic and ecological collapse, our expectations of life must drastically change.

Despite being abundantly blessed in so many ways, I am not a particularly grateful person. As a product of modernity, I expect life to be ‘thornless’ like my cultivated blackberry and tend to complain when things are difficult. Perhaps it would make more sense for me to expect life to be difficult to handle, like my wild bramble, full of thorns that rip and tear, and then to be grateful when life feels good and the berries are plentiful?

Do not fear what you are about to suffer Revelation 2:10a

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My turn to get it wrong

This is one of the eight salamanders I saw in the forest earlier this week!

My last post was about how traffic exemplifies our interconnectedness as human beings, and encouraged compassion on those parts of the traffic (and ourselves) that cause us difficulties. This afternoon it was my turn to be one of those difficult parts.

I accidentally drove the wrong way down an aisle of a shopping centre car-park and was confronted by the incandescent rage of a motorist coming in the opposite (correct) direction. In my defense, I had someone with reduced mobility in the car with me and was focused on finding a spot near the entrance – so when I spotted one, I turned in, not realising it meant I was breaking the rules. I was shocked by the violence of the other driver’s reaction, firstly because my misdemeanour didn’t impact upon them directly and secondly because their anger was so out of proportion to the gravity of my crime. I didn’t immediately react to the screaming, scowling and fist-shaking, because in the moment I was mostly curious about what this person was really angry about. However, I was shaken up enough to subsequently drive over a bollard when reversing into a less convenient parking spot.

It just goes to show how much damage can result from choosing to believe the worst about another person and acting on it. As for me, I am going to get myself a cup of tea and try to calm down. Let’s hope the insurance company will deal with the rest of the damage.

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Psychotherapy and inconsiderate drivers

I love spiders. This one seemed to be suspended in mid-air. If your eyesight is good, you might be able to see her web.

I’ve just returned from a five-day road trip all the way up through France and into the North of England. Thankfully there wasn’t much traffic, but there were those inevitable stretches of roadworks where everything slows down as three lanes go into two… and those infuriating drivers who, rather than considerately changing lane as soon as reasonably possible, speed along the disappearing lane and force themselves in at the very last opportunity.

As we were driving along the Paris ring road (a half-hour detour, due to over-reliance on Google maps), I pondered the fact that although traffic is comprised of many different vehicles, it behaves like an entire organism. Each individual car is impacted by the rest – someone brakes suddenly in heavy traffic, and the ripple effect causes cars further back to come to a complete standstill.

This made me think of the Internal Family Systems Model approach to psychotherapy. This sees the mind as being comprised of multiple parts, each with a distinct subpersonality. Let me introduce you to some of mine: Judge Judy, Busy Beryl, and Anxious Audrey. Each of these subpersonalities means well, but they aren’t always helpful and can sometimes be downright counterproductive. The aim is to get to a point where, rather than resenting or struggling with parts of yourself, you can see them for what they are and bring the mind back into balance.

Back to the Paris ring road. When a car committed the aforementioned sin of racing ahead and pushing in, for a brief moment I could see it as a broken, wounded part of the whole traffic, with which I also identified, and rather than get angry with it, I felt compassion. Yes, the driver was behaving badly, but there could be all manner of reasons for why they had developed this behaviour as a coping strategy for life.

This sense of being part of a larger whole also made me think of Paul’s writing in 1 Corinthians 12:12-27 about the concept of the body of Christ. Despite the culture we swim in emphasizing our individuality and personal agency, in many ways we are profoundly connected to each other. What a difference it would make to our world if we could all recognise this!

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What mushrooms might reveal about the nature of God

Some chanterelles we hunted down last year

I’ve been reading a fascinating book by Keith Giles called The Quantum Sayings of Jesus. It’s a commentary on the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, about half of which feature in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. He goes to great lengths to justify their authenticity and then reads them through a lens of our connectedness with the divine, noting that our real problem isn’t our separation from God so much as our failure to realise that we are already one with God and with each other.

Although his interpretations ask a lot of the reader, they fit well with the teachings of Richard Rohr and others on the limitations and dangers of dualistic thinking and our need to wake up to our profound union, in Christ, with everyone and everything else. One of my problems with this kind of thinking is that it is difficult to conceptualise. The image that comes to my mind is that of a mycelial network.

I have always been fascinated by mushrooms, by their strange shapes and smells, by the way they can feed you, heal you, or poison you – and you better be sure you can identify them! Looking for mushrooms feels more like hunting than foraging, you might have an idea of where they are likely to be, but, unlike the bramble you can reliably return to year on year, you cannot count on locating them. There are so many factors at play and a big dose of the mysterious (or since I hunt in the autumn, perhaps it’s a dose of the mist-erious?)

The mushrooms themselves are just a tiny part of the whole organism, they are the fruiting bodies that pop up above the surface at an opportune moment, while underneath the ground there is a huge fungal network connecting plants and trees through their roots, continuously exchanging resources and information.

I like to imagine that God might inhabit his creation rather like a mycelial network, with living beings emerging from God to flourish upon the Earth for a time and then returning into Him, like mushrooms sprouting up from the mycelium for a few days and then decomposing back into the earth. I tried to express something of this connection in my post on 1 Corinthians 2:9-16.

Acts 17:28 In him we live and move and have our being
John 14:20 On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.

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Slugs, scissors and the denial of death

This lucky one escaped the slugs.

I shocked and horrified a colleague the other day by explaining that my approach to dealing with the overwhelming slug population in my garden was to snip them in half with scissors. Apparently, she will never look at me in the same way again. I admit that it does sound pretty horrible, perhaps she imagined me hounding the poor defenceless creatures and bloodthirstily relishing the moment of their demise? Let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth.

As I tried to explain to my colleague, by then in a state of shock and not very receptive to reason, it’s surely more humane to kill them quickly than to drag out their demise using salt, poison or beer? What’s more, I leave their uncontaminated remains to be consumed by other members of the ecosystem (which are probably other slugs, given the fact that the remaining individuals are getting progressively bigger). And I do feel bad about it, it gets harder the bigger the slugs get, and it’s especially difficult when they raise up the front part of their body in an attempt to ‘look human’ and shame me into sparing them. At least I do generally apologise to them first (unless I am too angry about the damage they’ve just done), but when push comes to shove, it’s between them and my vegetables (and they’ve already had more than their fair share).

My daughter, a slug-sympathiser who NEVER lies to me, wound me up terribly the other day by pointing out that slugs had an emotional capacity similar to that of dolphins. After a few seconds of stunned silence, I came to my senses, and continued snipping.

I know there are other methods, I tried out elaborate plastic cones this year that claimed to prevent the entry of molluscs, but my slugs clearly hadn’t read the instructions. Other people collect their slugs and snails and deposit them miles away, to prevent them from returning – but is that kind? Deporting them to unknown territory where they will probably get picked off anyway? Plus, I’m not willing to spend my limited energy on that kind of shenanigans. You might ask where the hedgehogs are in all of this? Well, I saw a couple of them under the hedge earlier in the year, but now they’re nowhere to be seen, and I can’t exactly import new ones.

Why is slicing slugs so problematic? I think it comes down to a denial of death. Killing slugs in this very direct way makes me face the unpleasant fact that I am taking their life away, but it’s their life or the life of my vegetables, and by extension my life. Beyond my hobby gardening, many other organisms have to die for me to live –even if these are usually ‘only’ plants. You can argue that not all forms of life are equal, but the taking of one life to sustain another is just a fact of existence. Or maybe we can look at it the other way around, that life is given, relished and then offered up to another form of life. When my time comes, I look forward to feeding the mushrooms.

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Sister Water

This is a reflection written for the start of Creationtide with the theme of water, based on the following passages: Job 37:1-13, Revelation 22:1-7 and John 19:31-37.

I love the book of Job, or at least parts of it. Interspersed between long speeches about Job’s suffering, and the possible reasons for it, are radiantly beautiful passages about the glory of God as revealed in the natural world. The passage I chose for our reading today is a beautiful reminder of the majesty of God’s gift of water in the form of snow, rain, ice, and moisture.

It was in the water that God ignited the first spark of life at least 3.5 billion years ago, bringing single-celled microbes into being near hydrothermal vents. By about 1.2 billion years later, a bacterium had emerged that could convert sunlight into chemical energy, releasing oxygen into the atmosphere as a by-product, and preparing the way for complex life to thrive in the millennia to come.

We humans, along with fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and other mammals, have retained something of that primordial ocean within bodies, in the form of the fluid that surrounds our cells. Nearly two-thirds of our bodies are composed of water, and we are entirely dependent on it for our survival. Our blood, sweat and salt tears are another reminder of our origins in the primordial seas.

Human life still begins in salt water: the foetus grows and plays in the amniotic fluid of its mother’s womb, and we speak of waters breaking when the time comes to deliver.

Water is a remarkable molecule, quite unlike any other. It is made up of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, which gives it a particular shape and electronic configuration that lead to specific properties. It is these properties that make water a blessing that sustains life like no other molecule could.

Its chemistry means that lakes don’t freeze completely solid in winter, nutrients are transported to the top of trees against the force of gravity, sweat cools us down, and the temperature of ponds stays relatively constant from day to night.

Water cycles continuously throughout the planet; liquid water evaporates into water vapor, condenses to form clouds, and precipitates back to earth in the form of rain and snow. This dynamic flow is essential for the wellbeing of every living thing on the planet.

But our relationship with water is distorted. We have forgotten our oceanic origins and severed our connection with the water that birthed us. We treat water as a commodity, something to be used and abused to the point that rivers are being polluted by industrial farms and contaminated once again with untreated sewage. What is happening with water on a planetary scale exemplifies our alienation from the rest of the non-human world. The increasingly erratic weather patterns we are experiencing in this ecological crisis often feature water: too much when there is flooding and too little in times of drought, and the weakening gulf stream that warms western Europe is carried in the Atlantic ocean.

The consequences of our alienation from the rest of creation are increasingly dire for people in particularly climate-sensitive countries. Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia, for example, have been badly affected by drought this year, with 68 million people needing urgent food aid.

For the sake of our brothers and sisters in these countries, and for many other good reasons, we urgently need to establish a healthy relationship with the non-human world, including the holy gift of Sister water, recognising, as St Francis did, our deep connection with her. In his Canticle to the Sun, he wrote “Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Water, which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste.”

The imagery of water flows through the Bible, sometimes as a symbol of judgement, as in the story of the flood or of the drought announced by Elijah, and sometimes as a symbol of grace, like the dew on Gideon’s fleece or when Jesus offered the water of life to the woman at the well.

We meet it again in our second reading from the book of Revelation. This apocalyptic text is full of strange images, and we aren’t meant to take them literally, but they are useful because pictures and images help us to make sense of our world.

This reading comes just after a description of the New Jerusalem, the perfect city in which God makes his home with mortals, where there will be no more death, mourning, crying or pain. It is a vision of future wholeness where the union between humans and God is so complete that there will be no need for the light of a lamp or of the sun. In this hopeful image of a restored creation, we read of a pristine, unpolluted river flowing straight from the throne of God and of the Lamb. This river bears the water of life, which sustains the tree of life. This tree produces a different fruit each month and its leaves are for the healing of the nations: this living water brings fruitfulness to the earth and peace to humanity.

Here, Sister Water is freed from her bondage to the consequences of our sin, free to fully be the gift from God that she is. In the new Jerusalem we also will be the people that God intended us to be. This is an image of shalom – of wholeness, health, peace, safety, fullness, rest and harmony. This shalom is a restored relationship between us and the rest of creation, and between us and God. The world desperately needs to experience this; our times are marked by people alienated from each other, from God and from the rest of creation, with increasingly catastrophic consequences.

So how do we get from the reality of where we are today, with our polluted rivers, floods, and droughts, to experiencing life in shalom, sustained by the metaphorical river of life that flows from God’s throne?

There is one last water image in our third reading that bridges this gap. In John’s account of the crucifixion, we read that soldiers pierced Jesus’s side to make sure that he was dead. Water then flowed from this wound – it is a rather gory image, but it can be understood as a symbol of Christ releasing his divine life into the world.

Think of it like this: when a seed falls to the ground and is buried, in time it breaks open to release the new life of a seedling. Jesus on the cross is like a seed that is buried, dies and then releases his life into the world through the holy spirit. This divine life heals the ruptures within humanity, between humanity and creation, and between humanity and God.

This healing of ruptures, this all-encompassing shalom, is something we hope for in the fullness of time, but it also something we are called to live out in the present. This includes being at peace with water and with the rest of creation; but we can’t manage this in our own strength, as if the future of the planet rests entirely on our shoulders. Christ is the one who has broken the power of death and decay – he is the source of the water of life – and it is through him that shalom is coming. And yet, at the same time, we are his body now, and in the unfathomable mystery of God’s wisdom, he doesn’t do much, if anything, without our cooperation, and so we need to be radically open to whatever part he is calling us to play.

Returning to where we began, in the water, I encourage us to develop a deeper respect for Sister water, to conserve her rather than waste her. But there is more to this than switching the tap off when we brush our teeth; we need to look a little deeper and to use our imaginations. You’re probably quite familiar with the concept of the carbon footprint, but there is also our water footprint to consider. Everything we buy, use and throw away takes water to process and transport, we can use less water by making thoughtful purchases and reusing and recycling more. The same goes for food and, in this case, we can save water by eating lower on the food chain – so more plants and less meat and dairy products – by eating more whole foods and, very importantly, by not wasting food.

This is a call to live wisely, which brings me back to the image of the tree of life flourishing on the banks of the river in the New Jerusalem. It reminds me of Psalm 1, where we learn that a wise person who seeks God is like a tree planted by a river, whose leaves do not wither when the dry times come. By sinking our roots deep down into God, we can find our way to wisdom. There we can drink from the living water, which will make us fruitful and grow us into peacemakers, shalom-builders, in this world that is crying out for wholeness, peace and restoration.

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Elderberries, hens and societal collapse

Straining the juice

Beautiful patterns in the nascent jelly

We went foraging a lot when I was a child, for blackberries, elderberries, and even firewood on a couple of occasions; the fun continued when we got home, with hot cauldrons of boiling jam and jars of jewel-like sweetness. To this day I have a very soft spot for certain preserves, elderberry and apple jelly being one of them – it has a very particular taste that doesn’t suit everyone’s palate, but it reminds me of those happy days foraging.

Not long after we moved in to our current home, I planted an elder tree in the garden, and for the last couple of years it has had enough fruit on it to make jelly, so yesterday I harvested the berries. I looked up a recipe online and stumbled across a blog post entitled Taking Care of the Elders, which brought me up short. The author of this blog encourages her readers to forage responsibly, only taking a maximum of 10% of the berries from each tree, leaving the rest for the wildlife and giving the tree a good chance of reproducing itself. I, however, practically stripped my tree bare.

In my defence, this is a tree that I had planted, not a wild specimen, and I couldn’t risk letting the juicy dark red clusters fall onto my neighbour’s pristine astroturf – but that isn’t the point. Despite having read Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants less than a year ago and totally taking on board the author’s mantra of reciprocity, respect, and restraint, I didn’t remotely reflect on that as I greedily, but at least gratefully, took all the ripe berries I could reach.

I’m clearly not the only person with this problem, as in many parts of Switzerland there are strict rules, for example about mushrooms: when you are allowed to pick them, and how many, in order to protect them for the future, which is important as mushroom picking grows in popularity. This tendency to take too much is part of a much bigger problem, as described in the book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive; why societies fall apart is obviously a complex question with many factors involved, but one analogy that stuck with me from this book was how often we choose to eat the ‘hen’ rather than sustainably eating her ‘eggs’.

Perhaps I can at least partly blame the culture I find myself in, with its very short-term perspective, fear of scarcity and the need to hoard to get through the winter? It pains me to say how very challenged I am by the Indian proverb “Store your grain in your neighbour’s belly”, as I am far more likely to fill up my freezer than to be generous towards others with any abundance from my garden.

I can’t promise to limit myself to only 10% of next year’s potential elderberry harvest, but I will at least remember this reflection and leave some for the birds.