Sangha of Auspicious Companions

What Blackberries Teach About Being Human

Rebecca Solnit once stood in a creek for hours, picking blackberries until her hands were scratched and stained purple, until the quiet had soaked into her. The jam she made was runny and seedy, but she gave it anyway — not as product but as process, as summer itself. Now Silicon Valley tells us to skip the wading, the scratches, the slow ripening of attention. We can order berries online, let AI judge their ripeness, outsource even our love letters and grief. But what we’re abandoning isn’t inefficiency — it’s the work of forging a self. As one bookstore clerk lamented, “People under 30 don’t make eye contact.” We resist the tyranny of the quantifiable by naming what gets lost: the embodied animal joy of holding and being held, the resilience built through unmediated contact, the subtle wealth of giving as well as receiving. Ease, it turns out, can be corrosive.

Be The Change

Today, deliberately choose the slower path in one interaction: speak your order to a person instead of tapping a screen, write a thank-you note by hand, or simply hold someone’s gaze long enough to really see them. Notice what the friction gives you.