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