Wild Berries

Tell me if this has ever happened to you: I opened my mouth to say a mundane truth, but what came out of my mouth instead was a profound truth, the kind that has the potential to ruin you, then rebuild you back. It was the truth that had been nagging at the back of my brain, but I hadn't given it full frontal attention yet, at least not in a long long time; I hadn't given a voice to it, and saying the words out loud: "I am afraid, this is what I fear," healed me in a way that only when you shine a light in a dark cave can; where the light burns and burns away at the grime around the edges of that place, the walls start to erode, and in come the flood waters, and the next thing you know, you are weeping and even when you feel controlled enough to stop, you continue to weep because it feels right, it feels good to let the moving water wash that place OUT now that the light is shining on it.  You fall asleep exhausted but then wake up feeling the emptiness of that space you'd cleared, but keep the light shining there, look at it, wait and see, wait and see.  Awkward in your own skin because new steps don't feel natural or even comfortable when they are still new, when you are still blazing a new trail through your own heart vines. 

      I remembered how on Sunday night, we were walking through ruins of old broken down brick buildings; this was in California, so obviously these buildings were built in a time before building with bricks was prohibited in California (earthquakes) and behind the ruined buildings were the brambles that had grown up through what used to be someones home.  Yards and yards of berry bushes; bramble and bushes ripe and dripping juice, just behind what was once a great catastrophe.  We ate berries, they were sweet, berry sour and abundant, but if we don't pick them this week, they are going to all start to dry up and rot on the vine. But it is not easy to pick wild overgrown berries; left untended so long, they are surrounded by protective thorns, and who knows what thrives in the dark depths of their bushes, probably snakes and rodents with sharp teeth and diseases, so fast things can get taken over, when not consciously and vigorously maintained.

-XOXO,