Cerebral Maternal Irony: Urban Berry Picking

My Journal

2/15/14

Today I don't want to be introspective. I want to just be superficial, which is kind of different for me, not in an arrogant way, just in a factual way. I thought it was interesting when I read an article about a guy who decided to follow Ben Franklin's schedule for a day. Ben left time for study and to deal with spiritual things. The author said he almost never did that, and it was an interesting thing for him to do. Thinking about big things like God and purpose and why we are here and doing research into those questions is something I grew up doing and something I do all the time. How can you not wonder about that? How can you just go through life and just go to work, come home, be with your someone, party sometimes and that is it. That is satisfying? Really? Don't you wonder about things as a whole? Don't you wonder why we are here or how, or do you just take science's or God's word for it and leave it at that. I guess in a way you could have more of your emotional energy available to fritter away on personal drama. That might be interesting. I know it is kind of a weight on me to wonder about my, and our purpose, to wonder what or who else is out there, and it is a huge itch I am just dying to scratch to see everything as it really is. I used to think I would just go to heaven and God would explain it all to me and I could live with that. Now I am not so sure I will ever know, and ugh, that is annoying.

But to live without that burden, to me is to live in a closet. To live in the small world of what I see now. I just need to get out into the air and breath and wonder, and make wild guesses and hope. So with that comes the burden of what I don't know, of making choices and just not knowing if they are the right ones because I can't have all the information. I can't see past death or into the new millennium, so I have to make some of my best guesses blind.

Friday, August 5, 2011

Urban Berry Picking

I meant to post these pictures months ago. We had this little adventure in June. A few months before the kids and I noticed tiny red berries appearing on thorny bushes in our yard and down the street in a field by a light pole. We waited and watched. Finally the day came when we found five black ones, which we promptly disbursed among family members. Dad, who has painful memories of investing hours of his childhood picking buckets and buckets of wild black raspberries for his Mom's locally popular pies, grimaced, and muttered a comment about them being sour or bitter or something. Undeterred, Evan, Nina, Cory and I went out a week later to collect our harvest. Arin, the smart one of the family, stayed in the air conditioning. As you can see it is always important to be fashionable when you pick berries in the city. Nina insisted on the brightly colored tie-dye shirt, handmade necklace, and fuzzy pink hat ensemble, to coordinate with the 90 degree temperatures, and thorny, jewelery-grabbing branches. We shared our berry crop with the family, including Grandma and Grandpa.