Gifts from the Earth

In Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass, she writes about picking wild strawberries. In Potawatomi, the strawberry is known as ode min – the heart berry. She tells one of their Creation stories which explains how the berries became so called.  Skywoman buried her daughter in the earth and the strawberry arose from her heart.

This story made me look on our patch of wild strawberries very differently. One area of our garden is separate from the rest – a triangular patch of semi-wild garden where each year a fine red web spreads across from the mature plants with many young ones somehow managing to thrive in the poorest of ground.

In the past I’ve pulled up many of these, not really appreciating fully the generous crop of tiny succulent berries that they produce – so many that on a hot day the garden smells like strawberry jam.

After reading Robin’s book I now think differently – these heart berries are gifts from the earth and I should be cherishing them.

 

 

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Remember the Power of Now

I’ve just been reading Dan Pederson’s piece The Chase where he writes –Life can’t always be about getting somewhere. At some point it has to be about now. At some point now has to be okay. Otherwise it never will be. We’ll just keep chasing a fantasy, an ideal version of life, an imaginary place in the future where everything is the way we want it to be.

Sometimes we need reminding of the importance of ‘now’. It’s all too easy to get tied up in worrying about the future, regretting things that happened or didn’t happen in the past. If we do this then we can’t be making the most of the ‘now’.  We can’t know what the future holds for us or how many more ‘now’ moments we’ll have.

Eckhart Tolle wrote a bestselling book The Power of Now and also A New Earth. It’s always worth finding time among the busyness of life to read. These I read some years ago.

Just now I’m discovering the wisdom in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass – watch this space …

But we do need to take time out to just ‘be’ in the moment. Sometimes a beautiful sky can make us stop, empty our minds of ‘to do’ lists and drift …