A Sense of Perspective
I was looking off the back porch on Friday and saw this:
What does it look like to you? To you, it might look like some bushes, but to me it looks like blackberry jam. Or, if I tilt my head slightly and squint, pie.
I'm sure you've heard about the honey bee die-off, and what you can't see in this picture are hundreds of bees swarming all over the blackberry blossoms doing their busy bee thing.
The hive is in a giant tree on the border of our property and our neighbor's, above a bunch of California buckeye trees, which, if you click the link, you'll find are poisonous to bees. When we first moved here, we would constantly find stoned bees lolling around the driveway doing little bee somersaults. Then, at the beginning of this summer, the driveway was inexplicably littered with tiny corpses. We looked up where the hive was an saw nothing, so you can imagine my relief to see zillions of them in the blackberry bushes.
You can see the blossoms a little better here:
The structure is the one the Pirate had built to make the blackberries a little more accessible. I personally am not entirely convinced it'll work, but like the rest of our lives, it's a work in progress. It'll be another couple of months before the berries are ready to pick. The Pirate has also made a blackberry picker - a can with a V-shaped notch cut into it and fastened onto the end of a long stick. We'll use that to grab as many of the little treasures as possible.
I love the blackberry bushes because they bring out an entirely different set of birds than the ones that live with us year-round. It's not unusual to look out the kitchen window and see some kind of bug catcher swooping and diving about the creek eating four times its body weight in bugs. It must be nice to be able to feed oneself by merely doing the human equivalent of walking very fast with one's mouth open. But come fruit season, the fruit eaters come to call. Our blackberry bushes, being on the downslope from the chicken coop (and therefore from the most amazingly rich fertilizer in the world) and on the bank of a creek is prolific - there's more than enough for both us and the birds and a few that nobody ever gets around to. I love that feeling of plenty, of overabundance that leads to the kind of generosity that comes from recognizing that it's just not productive to be greedy. I'll have what I need, you'll have what you need and if anyone else comes along, there'll still be enough.
If only the rest of the world worked that way.
What does it look like to you? To you, it might look like some bushes, but to me it looks like blackberry jam. Or, if I tilt my head slightly and squint, pie.
I'm sure you've heard about the honey bee die-off, and what you can't see in this picture are hundreds of bees swarming all over the blackberry blossoms doing their busy bee thing.
The hive is in a giant tree on the border of our property and our neighbor's, above a bunch of California buckeye trees, which, if you click the link, you'll find are poisonous to bees. When we first moved here, we would constantly find stoned bees lolling around the driveway doing little bee somersaults. Then, at the beginning of this summer, the driveway was inexplicably littered with tiny corpses. We looked up where the hive was an saw nothing, so you can imagine my relief to see zillions of them in the blackberry bushes.
You can see the blossoms a little better here:
The structure is the one the Pirate had built to make the blackberries a little more accessible. I personally am not entirely convinced it'll work, but like the rest of our lives, it's a work in progress. It'll be another couple of months before the berries are ready to pick. The Pirate has also made a blackberry picker - a can with a V-shaped notch cut into it and fastened onto the end of a long stick. We'll use that to grab as many of the little treasures as possible.
I love the blackberry bushes because they bring out an entirely different set of birds than the ones that live with us year-round. It's not unusual to look out the kitchen window and see some kind of bug catcher swooping and diving about the creek eating four times its body weight in bugs. It must be nice to be able to feed oneself by merely doing the human equivalent of walking very fast with one's mouth open. But come fruit season, the fruit eaters come to call. Our blackberry bushes, being on the downslope from the chicken coop (and therefore from the most amazingly rich fertilizer in the world) and on the bank of a creek is prolific - there's more than enough for both us and the birds and a few that nobody ever gets around to. I love that feeling of plenty, of overabundance that leads to the kind of generosity that comes from recognizing that it's just not productive to be greedy. I'll have what I need, you'll have what you need and if anyone else comes along, there'll still be enough.
If only the rest of the world worked that way.
posted by Aoibheall | 9:59 PM
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