Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

I had just been emailed a link to the video that begins this Dispatch by the organizers of an upcoming live event when, not an hour later and pretty much when I Least Expected It, my Berry Brain Receptor Gene kicked in (I have very little doubt this will be identified when the Genome Parsers get down to the important stuff.) It became, to be explicit, Berry O’clock. For a long time.

Perhaps it already had been, pre-consciously. I recall I was thinking about items I still needed for the upcoming jam-making season while watching that video, which I enjoyed, because it sums up a lot of what drives me, sustainably speaking, in under three minutes.

A friend of mine in college liked to remind we less frequent imbibers that “it’s always Happy Hour Somewhere.” I’m not sure what exactly I’m confessing when I report that now I’m the one frequently repeating an analog, namely, “It’s always Berry O’clock somewhere.”

Oh, who am I kidding? I know exactly what I’m confessing. I’m openly addicted to the pace at which the universe expands during Berry Picking Time, and not very interested in quitting. I would give up seven of my favorite ten things to have been the first mammal (or maybe it was a bird) to discover wild berries.

I certainly can’t carry this wish as far forward as human beings, evolutionarily, because I learned from bumping belly to belly with a similarly berry-neurotransmitter-activated (or connected, or however it is our electrochemical bridges are lowered) 350-pound brown bear in Alaska almost ten Berry Picking seasons ago that the effect is far more than species-specific. We grunted “Good morning” to each other, the ursine and I, both completely sincerely and neither anything like afraid or aggressive, and then each continued berry-gorging -– wild blueberries in this case, if I remember correctly (first sign of Berry Time addiction: selective berry batch location blackouts, as a means of “protecting” the stash).

If one must parse it academically, it’s the meditative motion as much as the juicy vitamins
 that hooks one. Berry Picking (and, let’s not kid ourselves, to qualify as “gorging,” a Berry Picking session must entail at least an “eat 70%, bring home 30% for jam and whatnot” ratio) is a total, involuntary dwelling in the Now. In other words, the Berry Activation Gene is a direct route, probably not the only one and all-too-often only a temporary one, to Enlightenment. That bonding with the brown bear was as enduringly valuable for me as a life lesson as was meeting Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma.
 They’re both freedom-fighter heroes, as far as I’m concerned. Internal and external world freedom being equally important.

I think of that “neutral ground, we’re all on Berry Time today” bear encounter every time I make the magical discovery of a patch of edible Earth, which I did, as I say, shortly after watching the above video. I’d say “miraculously” but doesn’t every moment contain a few billion miracles?

Like so many of life’s unexpected level jumps and bliss-secreting experiences, it almost didn’t happen. (“Unexpected” being the psychically operative word here.) My son was pretty sure that he was done (that is to say, halfway done) with our creek-side hiking expedition once we played Pooh Sticks off a valley bridge (if unfamiliar with this sport, see The House at Pooh Corner, Chapter Six, and consider trying the game itself: it’s fun for all ages). And he had a point: it was late, we’d just “flown” kites in a rather exhausting, low-wind exercise, and a scrumptious dinner was waiting a solid mile trek back if we turned around now.

We had no idea it was Peaking Wild Strawberry Day in this particular enchanted nook of the planet.

Only at the final asking of the ritual, “shall we head home or circle around past the second bridge?” question did my three-year-old switch his vote to Continue On! (which he now, explicitly, recognizes as a generally good default answer in life. Score one for homeschooling.

By way of providing all necessary background information, here, I think, is a good place to mention an important cluster of bytes that explains the fairly unrestrained use of adjectives like “bliss” and “enlightenment” in this Dispatch: on the particular afternoon concerned, we had explicitly decided, for a variety of maximizing-the-day reasons, not to drive three hours each way to an organic commercial berry-picking farm. One of the reasons for this decision was that six hours in even a vegetable oil-powered conveyance seemed not quite worth two hours of Berry O’clock.

Though that was arguable. We still wavered. Clinching the decision to “have a relaxing day near home” (beyond living in a beautiful spot that could never itself be fully explored, as it evolved constantly as much as we did), was that our putative expeditionary goal was a blueberry farm, and I was of the mind that, oh, I dunno, strawberries might be a better choice for small children, the fruit being lower to the ground and less potentially pokey. But, whatdya gonna do? Only blueberries were available. Let’s wait a few weeks and “just” go fly a kite.

So the universe, as it so often does, delivered the berries to us.

Strawberries, you understand. Wild ones. We literally stumbled upon them, as we were circling back home the second time after having left the kite (not mentioning any names, we operate as a group) on the second bridge.

And to think some people don’t live in Appreciation.

Or, as I call it at this time of year, Bear Mind. I already can sense that I’ll be firmly in Berry O’clock from now until the first frost, on each hike, heck, on each walk to the mailbox. I’ll, in most essential mind categories, be indistinguishable from a bear. As for the empty-mind mantra imposed during the season’s first excessive berry feeding, I emerged thinkin’ ’bout keepin’ it fresh, in life and creative work. The whole, “the best is yet to come” mindset. What you might call the Neil Young creative achievement model versus the Jake LaMotta one.

Specifically, when we were all red-fingered, juicy-lipped and belly-sated (and when you’ve got my genetic make-up, that last takes maybe thousands of berries, and it was by this point getting so dark that I don’t know that we would’ve seen a bear if we had bumped into its similarly gorged belly), I looked up at the last half-erased smear of sunlight in the sky and thought (then stickily typed into my phone), “Horizons (physical, spiritual and practical) are the main things to appreciate if the goal is a free, kind, inspired and content life. In the awareness that there’s always something beyond even the broadest one, I believe, resides a life lived in the present, in the giggling truth.”

When in I’m living in bliss (berry-induced or otherwise), I remember that I believe the truth both is our friend and has a terrific sense of humor it is always eager to share. Which is not to presume that everyone or anyone is rigged like I am. I’m just speaking for myself.

That said, I’ve been watching a few others, including, judging by his spontaneous bursting forth into “The Farmer In The Dell,” the visibly and audibly blissed-out three-year-old kid with the red fingers and berry-engorged tummy who happened to be next to me when the above thought arrived.

He, for one, sure appeared to feel the same way (when I put away my phone, he grabbed a spring of wild fennel for a tail and invited me to hop along with him “like a rabbit.”) But in the name of double-blind repeating of the experiment, I’ll be following with great interest the evolving fishing horizons of this humanoid, my oldest son, who, thanks to a successful first and second cast, currently believes (similar to his idol, the Muppet Ernie) that fishing is essentially a matter of calling to the fish. Requesting their emergence. His shorthand description of The Art of Fishing goes, “Cast. Reel. Cook. Eat. Repeat.”

I say with great respect and gratefulness to the fish, “May the lessons to come be helpful.” But then, how could they not be? This is the closed system (some call it a universe) into which we are wired: there is no result possible other than Learning or Postponing The Lessons We Need to Learn. Another word for this process is “life.”

Postscript: My Sweetheart directed me the evening of our berry-drench return home to feed our expensively dexterous one-year-old “on those solid color plates we don’t really care about.” A reasonable suggestion, I thought, given that our broken plate ratio is up to slightly more than one per day. But the very notion of manhandling The Horizon Lesson triggered a corollary instruction, also derived from dwelling in Berry O’clock, which is: that’s not how the universe operates, when it comes to material items at the very least, if not concepts, too. The plates that stay in our lives are not the ones we necessarily most wish to, but those that must.

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