16,000 strawberries

keying deeply into the pattern of all life

I bow my head. My jeans dampen at the knees as I sink into the acequia's recent flush through the soil to pump vitality into the plump fruit I'm harvesting for the next day's market. My hands reach for berries luscious in their ripeness, mouthwateringly uninhibited. Not the ones just beginning to blush, but the ones with a 360 degree ruby richness glimmering in the high-desert sun. My back aches in the best way: the labor of being in devotion, of humbling myself in the very posture of prayer, of gesturing in meditative rhythm. One definition of joy is the *pop* - both sound and a sensation buzzing through your fingertips - when ready strawberries are plucked from the vine. If you weren't in a place of deep awareness, you might miss that experience altogether, that marking of a transition from the very peak of its life cycle and into its proximate decay in the belly of some body: a baby's first ever berry or an elder's ticket to nostalgia, conjuring the dormant memory of the berries their grandfather grew. Now this berry has lived many lives, its own and that of generations, stimulating the memory networks that stretch from grandchild to grandfather//grandchild to grandfather. Suddenly, always, life is knitted together. I feel my own farming ancestors finding their way through the leaves toward that perfect offering.

"We search for something that will seem like truth to us; we search for understanding; we search for that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life; we search for the relations of things, one to another."

- John Steinbeck

Communing with the land in this way on a weekly basis is an essential component of my life. It is one of the most potent ways I remember to find balance and perspective, to remember part one of the most important truths being asked of us humans: I am not the most important being out there...

There are phases of life that are supremely self-obsessive by design. The trick is: we aren't meant to stay there. We are meant to stay as long as we need to, and then re-emerge into the next becoming and emerging that will inevitably require us to doula the death of, and over and over again. What I see playing out at a cultural scale, what I feel now that I'm back in the dating world, is the reality that people are not undergoing their rites of passage to completion and are instead getting stuck spinning in the muck without clarity on how to move forward. Instead of inviting in a deep pause to do their work, they are making a spectacle out of this place and continuing to perform it over and over again, whether in relationships or in public. Someone in my life is telling stories 3 years old repetitively, stories I already know and have heard a dozen times, stories he can't stop spinning because the death of that old life wasn't welcomed... instead it's being continuously resuscitated through toxic entanglements. It makes it very hard to develop a new relationship with him, and so I've discontinued connection entirely, because through me that old life played out endlessly, a presence hovering over and through every moment of our time together. Work wasn't being done to process and release it, boundaries with me were being violated to utilize my capacity for space-holding to keep the life-support machine plugged in. It took a moment to see what was happening, and I'm relieved to be free.

I know this by living it. For many years, I was trapped in my stories of suffering. The underworld was my haunted cavernous dwelling place. My mind was a prison and my attention was relentlessly attached and supremely consumed in my own self-importance and self-obsession. My relationships were portals for processing everything surfacing in the vast amount of excavation work being done in my psyche, my ancestral imprints, the fundamental rewrite of my genetic code – and I was so fortunate to have beloved companions hold me through my own death. But I was also a challenging person to be in relationship with – so little capacity to actually be in a place of mutuality. I was sick with psychic struggle and I needed mostly one-directional caretaking. I was actually not available (or at least this was my perception at the time) for the 'relations of things, one to another'. If only I knew, despite being advised countless times, that this phase would end, an "under construction" sign should have been placed at the doorstep of my being and I could have been more careful about attempting to cultivate new relationships, to exposing myself to what I wasn't able to handle. If these death moments were better understood, appreciated, and even revered in our wider cultures, we might have better infrastructures in place to hold one another through breakdown.

But this is the wisdom of aging. Once you go through one of those subterranean confrontations with the darkest shadows residing in your soul, you know how to remove yourself from the above-world intensity, to go dormant, to be self-responsible, to lean on strong relationships that can help see you through, to not press too hard on weak ties, to go through what you need to grow through.

You also learn how to not take it all too seriously, how to let more light and breath in to these excruciating moments, how to hold it all with the kind of grace that remembers you into the wider story of rising and falling happening all around us at all times.

The turning point in my transformation arrived when I started farming. Everything I needed was waiting for me in an intimacy with the Earth unlike anything I had yet experienced. It returned me to the land of the living from my arduous journey through the valleys of death. I found the footholds to climb out of some of the darkest hells to find a life ready for another full bloom, for a soft, slow, sun-drenched ripening of fruit, so fortifyingly nourished by the rich soils I'd made through all that labor.

The compost process is a profound metaphor offering us insight into this alchemical process we confront repeatedly through life. If you are down in a scorching, acidic, suffocating, anaerobic churn, something is not right. When it gets too hot, too dense, too unsurvivable except for the planet's simultaneously most resilient and most deadly creatures – the ones that cause disease and infection – you are on the road to decay and rot that cannot support new life. The process needs to be opened up with oxygen and water, breath and hydration, and then the transformation can be generative not destructive. (See: This Compost by Walt Whitman)

"I think of the human race as someone who became separated from their mother's hand in a department store... for fifteen thousand years."

- Terrence McKenna

When I'm low to the ground, at a berry-level view, part two of this truth comes into sharper view: ...and I am integral to the web of all life.

We know that human collaboration with the more-than-human world generates prolific abundance. We know the Amazon is one of the oldest and most diverse and productive food forests, intentionally stewarded as such more than 8,000 years ago, with deliberate designations for agriculture and preservation of a fully intact canopy for a hybrid wild+cultivated ecology. The Amazon did not become The Amazon on its own. And it is not dying on its own, either. A tool in your hand, a plan for the land, is a profound ethical contemplation. To remember this capability is not to (attempt to) wield a God-like authority, but a sacred responsibility. The strawberry field sings its aliveness specifically because the skillfulness of the main farmer, Nery, is proving itself out through his exquisite devotion, through the way he prays to his seeds, through the visions he holds with faith of vitality and flourishing, through his (literal) conversations with the berries and lettuces and chiles he partners with, through the sacrifices he makes to be a relational being on this Earth.

When farming, you are confronted with the death / rebirth cycle on both accelerated and geological timelines. A "weed" that emerged that morning can die in your grip by the afternoon. A root planted 6 months ago can suddenly leaf and bloom and become a juicy delicious fruit all within 3 weeks. A 10 hour day harvesting at least 16,000 (!! I'm not kidding) strawberries with just one other person can fly by. And I think intentionally embedding ourselves in activities that place us on multiple timelines and several lived experiences (human and the infinity of other beings) and numerous processes/intelligences is one of the most healing gestures we can make. This widens our capacity, this expands our field of view, this de-centers us, this reminds us of interdependence. And maybe cultivating food is not accessible or possible to you. But maybe this way of being can infuse your life by the way you tend to your houseplants, the way you raise your pets, the way you produce a meal, the way you write in your journal, the way you walk through your neighborhood or a forest trail. There are many alivenesses happening. There are many ways to “key us deeply into the pattern of all life; …[to] the relations of things, one to another.” There are many ways to remember: "I am not the most important being out there and I am integral to the web of all life."

Sometimes
David Whyte

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,

breathing
like the ones
in the old stories,

who could cross
a shimmering bed of leaves
without a sound,

you come to a place
whose only task

is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests,

conceived out of nowhere
but in this place
beginning to lead everywhere.

Requests to stop what
you are doing right now,
and

to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,

questions
that can make
or unmake
a life,

questions
that have patiently
waited for you,

questions
that have no right
to go away.

---

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