Author: Margaret Bendet (Page 5 of 6)

I’m Margaret Bendet. I left a journalism career to live in a spiritual community and, after several decades, left that community to become, once again, a professional writer. That’s the nature of my re-entry. The question is, how to do it gracefully. How to return while remembering where I’ve been and why I was there.

Nutritional Overhaul

October 30, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

I’ve long been wary of diets that forbid that trinity of culinary pleasure—dairy, wheat, sugar. Physical pain is a powerful incentive for change, but can changing your diet truly provide a cure? Then a friend with arthritis gave a glowing account of her own nutritional overhaul, an approach called The Abascal Way.

I remembered that a book by that very name had been sitting in the library, on a shelf in my line of vision for at least a month. The next time I was in the library, I found this book, took it home, and put it on my dining room table, where it sat for another week and a half, unopened. Having such a book is one thing; reading it is what threatens the status quo.

Then I spent an entire day in a meditation workshop, and when I got home, I picked up The Abascal Way and began to go through it. The next morning I started the diet.

I wasn’t committed to actually doing the diet, you understand. I was just going to put a couple of the principles into practice: a breakfast with no grains; a breakfast that’s half protein and half fruit or vegetables. It stretched my ingenuity to come up with such a breakfast, but I did. That first morning I ate fried eggs and kale.

Later in the day two friends from Seattle dropped in. I mentioned this impossible new eating plan—No grains, indeed! What other breakfasts are there?—and it turned out Alice and Jane had been following this diet for a year, they’d taken Abascal workshops online, they knew the founder’s story.

Kathy Abascal lives on nearby Vashon Island, a lawyer who also studied neurobiology and botanical medicine. To deal with her own health issues, she developed a nutritional program she describes in her books and now teaches in that online class called TQI—To Quiet Inflammation.

I got more serious about my new diet. It was now my new diet. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I’d stopped eating chocolate and almost immediately started having less arthritic pain in my right foot. But less pain is not the same as painless, and this is what I’m shooting for. I’ve been on the Abascal diet—and truly on it since that first day—for three weeks now. My newly un-inflamed foot is a joy to walk on.

What is most interesting to me is why it took me so long to let go of culinary crutches that I knew, intuitively, weren’t good for my body.

Chai, for instance, is an Indian-style tea I was drinking in quantity every day. I’ve loved this sweet, strong, milky, spiced concoction since the first time I tasted it, forty years ago. And I’d been telling myself, “This isn’t so bad.” The spices—ginger, cardamom, fennel, clove, cinnamon—are medicinal, and I was replacing the milk with soy creamer and the sugar with stevia. In her book, Abascal points out that packaged foods have additives. The third ingredient listed for that creamer is, I found, cane syrup—no wonder it tastes so yummy! As for stevia, Abascal writes that, from the body’s standpoint, sweet is sweet.

I let go of chai that first morning—you can do anything for one day—and found I could finally taste the black tea, which has quite an interesting flavor all its own. Now I look forward to a cup of tea in the morning, and because it’s not sweet, I don’t keep drinking it all morning long.

While I’ve overcome a few hurdles, I know there are more a ahead. I’m now facing my three favorite culinary holidays: Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Halloween!

I just have to find a way to remind myself that inflammation is a pain.

Life Spans

October 13, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

A few years back a beautiful and charismatic woman who was my next-door neighbor told me, repeatedly, that she was not going to die. I suggested that perhaps she’d experienced the part of her being that’s eternal, but she said, no, this was not it; her body was not going to die. I might die myself, if I chose to, but she wasn’t going to. She spoke in a tone of certainty, but her truth, however she had found it, was not what happened. About six months ago, this woman succumbed to her human destiny. She died.

As we all will.

My friend Donna Hood and I teach a course on some of the things we can do in light of the fact that we are going to die—record our favorite personal stories, write our own obituary. Who else is going to remember what matters most to us! Donna asked her elder daughter to write her (Donna’s) obituary, and she (the daughter) remembered an ancient and minor beauty crown but forgot to mention the existence of her own father.

We used to call the class “Preparing for the Inevitable,” but a few weeks ago Donna convinced me to change the name. “It scares people,” she said. “They don’t want to think about death.” Now we’re calling it “Legacy”—and it turns out Donna was right. Next week’s class has only one space left.

That’s fine, but death is inevitable. I do like to think about it. This is an ongoing contemplation for me, and it comes up in various forms:

What should I do with the time that’s left?

When I die, is there anything I’ll regret not having done?

How can I organize my life to make my death easier for people around me?

Yesterday morning I got an email from a man whose wife—healthy, vital, in her mid seventies—took our class about six months ago. In writing her own obituary, she had placed her death in 2028, far enough in the future that it didn’t impinge on today. This woman has now lost her mental faculties and is, in many ways, dead to life as she knew it. Last week, and her husband wrote to thank us for the fact that his late wife had written her obituary and a brief account of her life story. He said, “It was very important for the family to see this.”

So, our preparation to depart from this life can make a difference to the people who love us.

And once we acknowledge that our life will end, we might also be willing to look more closely at what supports us in living—what human beings actually need in order to live. Air. Water. Earth. Light. The list is short but pithy. If you have time for a two-minute video clip, this Conservation International link (sent by a friend this morning) is worth seeing.

In terms of life spans, what humanity does on this planet isn’t going to kill Mother Earth, but we could do in our own species. For sure, we’re wiping out others. That too is worth thinking about.

Because of Spam

October 6, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

This week I’m discontinuing the “comment” function on Re-Entry. As wonderful as your comments have been, I am tired of weeding out the spam to find them. Spam outnumbers legitimate comments about five to one and outweighs them, word for word, by twenty-five times.

Most are from China—or about China—and go on and on about a book fair in Shanghai or property development in Beijing or natural gas supplies in a place named Surui.

Many are in response to the first blog, “Blackberries Are Coming On”—the column that was the inspiration for my turning on the comment function in the first place. The artist (and writer!) Deon Matzen sent me an email in response to “Blackberries,” saying how much she enjoyed the blog and that it had inspired her to write her own essay on blackberries, which she attached. Here is an excerpt:

My nephew came to visit from Montana one year when they were in season and fell in love with them. Fell in more ways than one. He picked all the berries that he could reach from the roadside. He came back to the house and asked for a ladder. My husband let him take the orchard ladder out to the street. Needless to say the best, ripest, and biggest berries were just out of reach, even from the ladder. An orchard ladder has three legs and before he knew it, he had fallen into the briar patch. He was in about 6 feet and totally entrapped by the vicious, but luscious berries. His clothes were completely caught. He was like a fly in a spider’s web and could not move or help himself out. We heard his calls and finally came to the rescue with a large plank. He practically had to disrobe to get out and almost require stitches to repair his lacerations, but he still said it was worth it just to have the pie.

How delightful is this! Comments like Deon’s, I always want to see. So, if you have a comment, please do send it to me—by email. If you don’t have my email address, go to my website (MargaretBendet.com) and find it at the bottom of the homepage. The machines that send out spam, flooding normal communication so there’s no room left for mere people, cannot manage a maneuver that complicated.

And because the point of spam is to laden other blogs with links to your own, I’ll add one more link to this entry: if you’re interested in seeing the Monty Python sketch that led to “spam” becoming the name for nuisance emails that that take up all avaialbe space and time, click here... and enjoy!

Looking at Light

September 22, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

"Together and Apart" is Asian ink, gouache, and Japanese watercolor. For more, here is a link to Angie Dixon's website.

“Together and Apart” is Sumi (Asian ink), gouache, and Japanese watercolor. To see more, visit Angie Dixon’s website

I work part-time at the Whidbey Island library that’s in a double-wide, a cozy space where we have interesting conversations. One day we convinced a library patron to bring in her art portfolio from her car. This artist, Angie Dixon, showed us glorious pictures—horses, a friendly orangutan, and one I’ll never forget: a window with rays of light coming through it. Nothing else, just the light.

As a child, Angie said, she’d read a read a book whose story entered and took up residence in her, even though the book itself disappeared from her life and its title and author’s name were forgotten. Here is my telling of the story she outlined:

A child enters a light-filled room that has two floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto a lovely sunlit garden. A large gilt-framed mirror hangs between the windows, and it is this mirror that interests the girl. She walks up to the mirror and looks into it. It’s herself she sees, of course, and what she notices first is that she is becoming quite a big girl—a fine girl!

Of course, there’s that funny thing about the way her hair curls in the very back. She turns around, with her back almost to the mirror, and peers over her shoulder, looking critically at her reflection. Perhaps the hair will change in time. Her mother had suggested that once, and the girl had only dared to hope that it might, because her mother obviously didn’t like this tendency toward unruly curls.

The girl turns to face the mirror head-on. This is better. She looks much better this way. But she’s having trouble making out her reflection now. Why?

There is no light. The windows are like slits on the wall. They’re tiny! These windows were huge when she came into the room. How long ago was that? The girl isn’t sure.

She looks back at the mirror, and the minute she does that, the windows become still smaller. Horrified, she realizes she’s in almost total darkness. She walks over to the window then—if you could still call it a window—and reaches her hand toward the tiny ray of light that remains. Her finger won’t fit in the crevice. No, you wouldn’t call this a window at all. But it had once been a window.

Is there something she can do to make it a window again?

Angie doesn’t remember what happened at this point in the story. The girl had to do something to get back the light. “It was one of those fairy tales,” she said, “you know, where the heroine undertakes a mission or passes a test. The girl gets the light back, but I don’t remember how.”

If it were my story—and for this moment, why don’t we call it my story!—I would have the heroine pay attention to the light.

The girl looks intently at the window, willing it to expand. There is just a sliver of light now—and the light is extraordinary, the girl realizes; it’s beautiful, that light.

Once she notices its beauty, there is more light. The girl laughs then. It’s the first time she’s laughed since she walked into the room, and with her laughter, the slits in the wall become windows once again.

But they’re are more than just windows. These are doorways. The girl realizes she can do more than just stand in this room and look at the light. She can walk through the doorway. She can go outside, into the beautiful garden. She can be in the light.

So that’s what the girl does: she steps into the light.

Giving something our attention for the sake of delight—that is the magic key that expands anything in our lives. So, if it works for the rest of us, surely it would work for this girl in a fairy tale.

Smoking

September 16, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

When you pull together memories into a cohesive piece, like a book, some of your favorites won’t fit. One of these for me is about how, after the death of my first spiritual teacher—whom I refer to in the book as the swami—I went back home to Honolulu, got a job with a small local publisher, and took up smoking again. When my book finally comes out, this anecdote will not be in it. So, I’ll share it here. Continue reading

As Life Unravels

September 2, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

Whidbey artist Pam Winstanley does amazing work with silk.

Prayer flags, made by a friend, have been fluttering their good will and compassion in my backyard for a month now. I love the idea that these silk flags, vibrant but fragile, are doing their best for the universe in the short time they’ll be here. They’re a daily reminder that my life, too, is impermanent.

Earlier today at a happy hour celebration, I watched a woman in her early sixties sit before the candle on her birthday crème brulee and wonder aloud what to wish for. “There’s nothing more that I want,” she said. “I have so much joy in my life. I just want it all to remain as it is.” This is, of course, a wish we’ve all had at times, one that is never granted.

Life moves on, and it’s for the best. Frayed silk, sun-bleached color—dissolution has its own stark beauty and a reason for being.

This week, I learned a valuable lesson from a physical infirmity that is practically synonymous with aging. There had been intermittent pain in my right foot. I thought perhaps I’d strained it in the warrior pose, but the pain reoccurred over the course of weeks, was worse in the mornings, and was sometimes acute. I went to a doctor and told him, “I think I may have arthritis.”

“At your age?” he said. “Of course, you have arthritis. Sooner or later everyone has arthritis.” He told me to continue the exercise, especially in the morning, and to ice the foot afterward—excellent suggestions—and then he offered me a prescription for a pain medication.

I didn’t want a drug—the pain wasn’t that bad!—but then he gave me some sample pain pills, which were free and an insurance I could carry in my back pocket.

This was all good, but there was little change in the state of my foot.

A couple of weeks later, I received some clues about dealing with osteoarthritis that I wouldn’t hear from a doctor, and which now seem to be working.

The first was from a friend who asked how much I weigh, divided it by two, and told me that was the number of ounces of water I need to be drinking every day. “Clean water,” she said. “No chlorine. Filter it if you have to. Go to a health store and get the drops you put into water to make it alkaline.”

This woman, whom I hadn’t seen in decades, was in my face about water. “You take a vow,” she said. “You promise me—and I want you to call me in two weeks and let me know you’re doing it.”

So, I retrieved my plastic water filter from the back of a cupboard, bought the drops, increased my daily intake of water by about three hundred percent—and within a week of my drinking seventy ounces of water a day, my right foot became noticeably better. There was less pain.

The second clue came while I was on an outing to the Seattle Art Museum with a couple of colleagues from work. I’d brought along a bar of premium European dark chocolate, in case we needed a snack. Then I remembered that one of the women no longer eats chocolate. “It’s her right toe,” the other woman said. “She gets pain in her right toe whenever she eats chocolate.”

Her toe? Why would chocolate have anything to do with her toe? But the toe is so close to the foot, and then the woman herself explained that it was her arthritis that was being inflamed by the chocolate. Arthritis… foot…

I said, “I’m going to try it!” I fished that candy bar out of my purse and handed it to the only person present who still ate chocolate.

That was a week ago. I let go of chocolate and, within a couple of days, my foot felt almost normal. Most of the pain is gone, most of the time.

Many people will tell you that dark chocolate is good for you, and indeed it may be, if what you eat in a day is no bigger than the size of a Hershey’s kiss. I was doing one or two lines of chocolate from those three-and-half-ounce bars, both after lunch and after dinner. I ate lots of fresh, green, organic vegies, but I also ate lots of chocolate—not such a healthy diet.

Of course, I don’t know that stopping chocolate and increasing water is what’s healing my foot, but I’ll keep up this new regime for the time being. Right now, I’m not even tempted to do otherwise.

And I’m actually grateful for the arthritis. I’m taking much better care of myself than I was only a couple of weeks ago.

My point is that the unraveling that happens in our lives may not come in a way we would have chosen. No sane person making a birthday wish says, “What I really want is pain.” But when pain comes, it brings us gifts—that we receive, I think, as long as we keep flying our colors as best we can.

A Visitor

August 25, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

It was a Sunday morning. I’d slept in, meditated, and gone into the kitchen to make chai—when I had the feeling I was being watched. At the sliding screen door stood a large grey tomcat. I walked over and he sat, looking up at me. I sat. I opened the door a crack, put my hand out, and he arched his head under my fingers, encouraging me to pet him, which I did.

I have adopted a number of cats in my life, and this cat was lovely; this cat had a presence. I, however, currently have a commitment to a toy poodle, and Chou Chou is no friend to cats. So, even while I stroked this feline visitor, I was thinking, I can’t take you in!

Fortunately, the cat wore a collar and a tag with a phone number on each side—not a local number, I noticed. I called one and got an office answering machine; I called the other and got voicemail.

A minute later, the dog came tearing out of the bedroom, barking in fury at this invasion, and the cat fled. Then my phone rang.

“Did you just call my cell phone?” a woman asked. I told her about the cat.

“Oh my God!” she said. “Where do you live?” It turned out that this woman, Janice Martinez, and her partner, Michael Greenfield, had been docked at the Langley marina the week before. Kitty had jumped off their sailboat the previous Sunday. “He’d never done that before,” she said.

They spent days looking for the cat—met the local vet, who tried to help; met the owner of Music for the Eyes, who said that if Kitty showed up, he would fly him home to British Columbia. Because, in time, Kitty’s owners had to move on.

“We’re on Orcas Island now,” Janice said, “but we’ll come back for him.”

I was explaining that the cat had run off again, when I spotted him sitting under the front of my neighbor’s car.

“Put him in your bathroom,” Janice told me. “It’s just for today. We’ll be there.” But it took me a few minutes to get together clothes and a piece of smoked salmon, and by that time Kitty had disappeared again.

When you’re looking for a grey cat, the world is vast and dangerous place, full of hidden nooks and deadly predators.

I had to leave a cat behind once myself. Turning a beloved pet into a stray because you cannot find him and you cannot spend more time looking for him and you don’t know what else to do but go on—it’s an agony.

I felt the pain all over again that day: searching my neighbors’ yards for that grey cat; calling his owners; leaving the message that I hadn’t been able to catch Kitty; that he was, once again, MIA.

I was going to the Langley Shakespeare Festival that afternoon and was due at a friend’s house at 4:15. Just before 4:00, Chou Chou and I, coming back from a walk, saw a large grey cat on the driveway. The dog started barking again, tearing up the drive—and, of course, chasing the cat away. I could hardly blame Chou Chou. He hadn’t been looking for Kitty; he hadn’t missed that cat at all!

But it gave me hope… and five minutes later, I got call on my cell phone. It was Janice. “We’re here,” she said. “We’re in Langley. Where do you live?”

Even knowing I didn’t have their cat, these amazing people had spent the entire day to come back for him! From Orcas, they’d sailed their boat to Anacortes, rented a car, and driven down the length of Whidbey Island in the hopes of finding Kitty—a North American shorthair they had adopted as a rescue cat and loved. A cat they loved.

Kitty, back on his sailboat

I still had to go out, but I left Janice and Michael in my apartment—I would trust my life to people who went to these lengths for their cat! I told them I’d just seen Kitty; he couldn’t be far away.

And he wasn’t. This story has a happy ending. After an hour, they found Kitty, sitting in Island Church’s children’s play area, just over my back fence.

When I got home that night, I found a note that began, “We Found Him!” Janice went on to say that she thought Kitty had sensed “the energy” of my home. A meditator herself, she recognized certain signs of meditation in my apartment.

Later, when she sent the photo, she wrote that it was nice to read about Kitty’s adventure from my perspective, but what she and Michael most want to know is the cat’s story. What did he do in his week “living on the lam”? Because now that they’re home, it’s clear that Kitty has developed a bit of an attitude and a new taste for romping in the garden and woods. It’s probably the liberating effect of life on Whidbey Island but, whatever the cause, it’s brought permanent improvement to the cat’s life. Janice said, “I can’t imagine restricting him to a boat again.”

Coming Together

August 11, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

Photos by Kathy Rothschild: The thumbnail is the bride's mother.

Photos by Kathy Rothschild: The thumbnail is the bridal couple.

You can’t always figure out why two particular people bond. Often they don’t know themselves. Last weekend I went to the wedding of two truly beautiful young people, who married at the bride’s parents’ home in a garden the bride, a professional landscaper, had designed and her mother and father—working hard—put in with their own hands: six-foot stands of sunflowers and double tiger lilies waving in the breeze, a humungous climbing monkshood, and masses of dahlias.

Rather than having a religious functionary take them through ceremonial vows, these two young people passed out flutes of champagne and, standing in the midst of seventy-five family and friends, spoke about their love for each other. They’d both grown up on Whidbey Island and hadn’t liked each other much in high school. “He had an air about him,” the bride remembered, “an annoying way of brushing the hair out of his face…”

They went to the same college; they found common ground; she cut his hair. One summer he went on an ill-advised bicycle tour through Nevada and while he waited for the air to cool each day, they talked on the phone—for hours. She wrote in her diary about how one day she’d like to have a life partner and “wouldn’t it be funny” if it ended up being him? Later, she wrote down the date when she knew she loved him.

And the bridegroom talked about how this strong young woman keeps his compass pointed in right direction and how, if he gets off kilter—as he has before and must suspect at some point in his life he might once again—he knows he’ll fight to stay close to her steadying influence.

It was a Whidbey Island event: pot luck appetizers and salads fresh from backyard gardens and the farmers’ markets, a whole pig roasted in a European-style imu, paella prepared by the mother of the bride in a huge pan over an outdoor fire, and a table laden with wedding cakes—some bought at the last minute by one of the guests when it seemed like there might not be enough.

It was such an auspicious beginning—how better to step into marriage than by stating, clearly and in your own words, your love for this person! And it shouldn’t end there.

I had been working in the library that day; a man spent the shank of the afternoon in the leather-bound chair in the library’s back room reading The Brothers Karamazov because he couldn’t be at home with his wife. She needed the space to grieve their daughter’s death from cancer. “She needs space from me,” he admitted. He said that he was Vietnam vet, on medication, someone who never “got over” what happened in the war. “It’s not easy to kill people,” he said, and later he added, “…but it was harder on my wife. They give awards to the soldiers for being in battle. They should give awards to our wives for what they put up with. They should have a parade for the spouses.”

“Tell her that,” I told him. “Take your wife out to dinner tonight and tell her that.” A few days later, he said with a smile that he had done just that.

In our culture, we’re so ready to express our negativities, so eager to tell people what we think they’ve done wrong. Sometimes that’s important, but what we need more of, I feel, is the kind of truth-telling that expresses our love.

That’s the way to honor the bonds we form with each other, whatever the circumstance, whatever our reasons may have been for coming together.

The father of the bride is about to take a formal wedding portrait.

The Naked Lady Parties

August 4, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

My haul from the last Clothing Swap

They’re usually called Clothing Swaps, but a friend referred to them as the Naked Lady Parties—and once I’d heard that name, I couldn’t think of them by any other. Of course, nobody actually goes around in the buff, but these get-togethers do involve a number of women, most in their skivvies, and all of them trying on their friends’ cast-off clothing. It’s so much fun—and everyone finds something they love. I always do.

I’m wearing one of them right now—a sleeveless cotton print pullover that’s perfect for summer, that goes with two pairs of my short pants, and that, for one reason or another, I never would have paid my own money for. But it was free!

The way these parties work is that you put aside the clothes you’re no longer wearing, and when an invitation goes out, you take those clothes with you and add them to everyone else’s in a big pile in the center of the room. Then everyone starts “shopping” and trying on.

There is always some kind of food at these parties, along with wine, juice, or coffee, depending on the time of day. But the main thing that’s happening is the new-to-you clothing.

Certainly, I bring home some things from Naked Lady Parties that I don’t end up wearing—or wearing more than once—but who cares! I can take those pieces to the next party or, in the meantime, donate them to one of the extremely popular Whidbey Island second-hand stores: Senior Thrift, WAIF, and Good Cheer.

The custom is that unclaimed garments from the Naked Lady Parties go to Good Cheer, where the proceeds from all sales support the Good Cheer Food Bank and Garden, providing nutrition to the local people who feel they need it. (I say feel because there is no requirement to prove your need for this assistance; it’s on offer to a self-selecting clientele.)

And many, many local people who don’t need to wear second-hand clothing do so. There is a sort of reverse snobbism at work on Whidbey. Compliment a woman on something she’s wearing, and at least half the time, she’ll say, “I found it at Good Cheer”—and be quite obviously proud of the fact that she is reusing something discarded (green living!), demonstrating her lack of vanity, and employing her financial resources to the best possible advantage.

It’s SO Whidbey!

The Blackberries Are Coming On!

July 29, 2014 / Margaret Bendet

It’s time to celebrate blackberries! It was blackberry season when I arrived on Whidbey Island. A friend showed me a culvert cache in her neighborhood where I picked a plump berry half the size of my thumb and popped it into my mouth: juicy and sweet and warm from the sun. Within a few minutes we filled a recycled plastic container with berries and, after dinner, we ate them on ice cream.

Later, I scattered blackberries over cereal and pancakes and grilled salmon; I baked them in cobblers and muffins; I boiled them down into syrups and jams . . .

These nutritious berries—high in fiber and vitamin C—are a boon to anyone who eats on a budget, and arriving on Whidbey, I considered them a personal welcome gift from the universe, my new universe. On Whidbey blackberries are, really, everywhere: on vacant lots, between driveways, beside the highway, lining neighborhood streets, climbing walls, growing up through the middle of other bushes, hugging not the shoreline perhaps but the thin, sandy soil that’s just one step away. The bushes grow thick and tall; they’re tenacious, wickedly prickly, and absolutely aggressive—a bit like our own weedy species, I think, except that humankind doesn’t come to fruit so easily and predictably between early August and the autumn rains.

As with friends, I found it’s important to pick the right berries, the truly ripe ones. Blackberries come to maturation on individual time frames, meaning that two plump berries growing on the same twig so close together that they touch can be at varying stages of ripeness: one sweetly succulent and the other mouth-puckering. The early warning sign is this: if a berry is ready to be picked, it comes off the bush with just the slightest prompting from the picker.

When a blackberry offers any resistance at all, it’s not ready; move on to another berry. This means you can pick the best berries, the ripest berries, without crushing them. It took me a while to master this light touch, and so the first year my fingertips were stained dark purple throughout the season.

The blackberry’s prickles—often incorrectly called thorns because they are capable of ripping denim and drawing blood—have provided me many other valuable lessons. One of the more obvious is the importance of appropriate attire: old clothes, long sleeves, covered shoes. Because opportunities for berrying can come up unexpectedly, I began carrying the right clothes and some plastic containers in the trunk of my car.

But dressing right isn’t the whole story in dealing with blackberry prickles, and also with the huge spiders that take refuge in those prickles. That’s right: huge spiders. You never want to thrust your hand into a blackberry bush. You need to see beyond the berry the question; you need to take in the berry’s immediate environment. Otherwise you may receive a nasty surprise.

What you cannot help but notice in picking blackberries is that the best berries are just out of your reach. This will be true even if you are tall, as I am, or if you expand your reach, as many do, by bringing along a step-ladder, a long-handled fork (to pull branches down) or a even a plank (to lay across the front of the bush and allow you access to the inner branches). I don’t do any of this because I’ve found that no matter what I do, always, just beyond my fingertips are gigantic berries, tantalizingly fat berries, berries that are heavy with sweet juice.

There is only one solution here: Get over it. That’s life, isn’t it!

And my life is so much sweeter, I’ve found, when I allow myself to be satisfied with the glorious berries that are within my reach.