the fulcrum and the bear

Sometimes we pick raspberries …

There are some days when you just need to pick raspberries. Make bread. Nurse a baby mouse. Water the garden. The raspberries come ripe and either you will go out into the sunshine, breathe the air, bend over the canes – pick berry by berry – or the fruit slips past sweet, melts, falls. Pears are like this too. And apples. Catch them before they are gone, eaten, moldering into the ground.

And when you find tiny mice in the back seat of the car – furred but eyes not yet open – you can either abandon them, sacrifices on a rock for a predator god – or tuck them in a box, feed them goat’s milk from an eyedropper every two hours until you find a wildlife rehabilitator to take them in. Everything else suspended as the mouse grasps the glass dropper with tiny claws. The energy of each one unique, a singular frequency you can touch, that resonates through the fine bones of the hand as you warm her in your palm. (You will miss this vibration when it is gone).

There are days when you need to take the soaked and soured buckwheat batter, make it into bread. You water the roses, re-pot the aloe, transplant the white-rooted Chlorophytum comosum, make sure the hummingbirds still have sugar water – in case there are any left drifting south before the first frost. You must feed the bees.

The is ecology. Home-lessons of the borderlands. Pick fruit when ripe. Tend the garden. Feed the babies. Culture the bread. There is something larger than yourself. A world you fit into.