Blueberries

On Monday morning I sat for a while on a hill filled with blueberry bushes. The bushes were lush with their bluish-purple fruit.  I didn’t have to move very far to drop my handful of berries into the cardboard flat I was sharing with Tim.

It reminded me of Moses and his burning bush because I knew once again, I was on holy ground. The sun shining warm on my back and the taste of sweet berries on my tongue added to the sacredness of this moment.

In the row next to us there was a grandfather with his very young grandson picking berries too.  You could hear bits of their conversation.

 “Don’t pick the green ones.”

 “Why not?” 

“They need to grow just like you.”

“I can eat the purple ones?”

“Yes”

Their conversation reminded me of one of our girls’ favorite books, “Blueberries for Sal” by Robert Mccloskey. In this book Sal and her mother go to Blueberry Hill to pick blueberries for the winter.  Little Sal is more about the eating than the picking.  As McCloskey wrote,

Little Sal picked three berries and dropped them in her little tin pail. . .

kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk!

She picked three more berries and ate them. Then she picked more berries and dropped one in the pail — kuplunk! And the rest she ate. Then Little Sal ate all four blue-berries out of her pail!

We often read this story to our daughters when they were young. We always said together the kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk!  That was their very favorite part and it was repeated for emphasis. I thought about that on that Monday morning on our blueberry hill as I dropped my berries softly into the flat. 

Our girls are all grown up now and yet bushes still burn all around us.  Rabbi Arthur Waskow wrote this about Moses’ encounter with a burning bush, “Moses felt the breath rushing through his throat. Heard the breath become a Voice: “Just breathe, Moses. The Name is Yyyhhhwwwhhh, just breathing. The bush breathes out, you breathe in. I am the breath of life.”

It was so good to sit on the ground to pick and breathe, even if my pants bore the purple stain of that sacred ground. May each of us take time to taste and savor the goodness that is all around. Eat some of the purple ones right off the bush.  And leave that which is green in you to grow.