I rode my bike to and from work yesterday. It's that time of year here, where seemingly every street in Victoria proffers up a bounty of blackberries. I had ridden past a swath of intense ripeness near my office a couple of days before. The berries were fatter, shinier and more plentiful than any others I had seen this year. The bushes were literally dripping with the things, protected from human detection on this suburban stretch of pedestrian-unfriendly road. On that day, I had no container with me and was also in the throes of inertia. Once in motion it's easy to keep going. I was on the way to work, which is an hourlong ride, and to stop a few hundred meters before reaching my destination represented a delayed arrival, and later departure at the end of the day. The feeling of being on borrowed time welled up. So I rolled on.
Yesterday morning I stopped long enough to fill a travel mug and set them out on the counter for my co-workers when I arrived at the office. On the way home I had two empty lunch containers and a water bottle so stopped for much longer. As I picked I considered the process of the harvest. Blackberries bushes, especially these wild imports are intensely brambled. Every square inch of them is equipped with tiny and not so tiny barbs, ready to impale, embed, scratch and snag any piece of exposed skin or clothing that brushes up against them. At first, overwhelmed by the sheer density of the things, I tried to take more than one berry at a time, but soon found myself recoiling or dropping one or all of them as the plant's defences did their sharp work. Unlike blueberries, which is a friendlier plant, grabbing hasty fistfuls is not an option. My urge towards efficiency, to pluck more than one at a time, was having the opposite effect.
While I do my best to be aware of the feeling of rushing through things in my life killing two birds with one stone is often my modus operandi. This past couple of weeks when I have been walking my dog Kimik after work I have been taking him past the berry bushes near my house. He doesn't like this because his sniffing agenda gets curtailed by my picking agenda, and sometimes I am anchoring him too close to something prickly under his paws. He plants his feet and resists. Sometimes we stop at the little market on the way home too...so I don't have to go out for groceries afterwards. Kimbo doesn't like that either as he's not great at being tied up outside the store - if another dog walks by it triggers armageddon. He's a bit like a blackberry bush that way, I pay the consequences if I try to combine too many tasks with him. Multi-tasking is not supported by either of these beings.
Yesterday afternoon I picked slowly, methodically. Moving with my back to the traffic, I meandered along the row of bushes, taking one dark berry at a time, dropping each one into the container for the ride home. I dropped fewer, was stabbed less, and took the time to wait for the sway of each stem to slow before going in for the next one.
This is not new, this reminder to slow down and rest in the moments. It is just the next wave, some new stage of remembering to pause and take stock. On the rest of my ride home a quail chirped at me from the railing by the side of the bike path - it was inches from my face. A young stag watched me ride past, his ears flicking. I saw more things on my way, felt the way the air moved and changed against my skin, and allowed myself to drop into the sensation of pedalling up hills, less hellbent on getting to the top. More willing to let things be.
