The Free Radical

The bank of Silverberry bushes, as it’s now flowering, makes the whole forest smell like a candy shop. The roses too add such a pleasing spice to the air that their petals are in continually grave danger of being plucked and eaten at any moment.

This rose bush has no business trying to hide up in this tree! But in all fairness, it was an adequate strategy to prevent me from eating it. So kudos to you, little tree-climbing rose bush!

I managed six days in a row of feasting on puffballs (mushrooms) along the way. Then for two days I didn’t find any… and then yesterday, a few more. They’re a pleasant filler.

What’s surprising, despite the delicious deer legs to be had, is the frequency with which I still have to remind all the dogs “Don’t eat poop!” I guess we all have different ideas about what’s food and what’s not.

It’s all the graceful– and not-so-graceful– dance of predation… and, I suppose, it’s really easy to sneak up on a turd that’s just lying there in the grass bemoaning its fate: “I was once food… not too long ago; now look at me!”

Whether we’re full-on carnivores or dedicated vegetarians, it’s all sentience assimilating sentience– a sharing of experience through the subjectivity of complete communion. We all know and mostly agree that “You are what you eat,” but we don’t consider much that what we eat is equally us for the time it shares our system.

Every morsel of food that passes our lips partakes of our full human expression, experiencing exactly what we experience, for the time it takes to pass through our digestive tract. That brief “human experience” is logged into the soul-repository for whatever species it originally belonged to. Our food gets to go on a “human trip”… and the uniqueness of the experience is greatly appreciated… in natural settings.

Usually, the dance of predation is carried out instantaneously. Typically, in a natural setting, whatever prey is being consumed gets eaten immediately after its connection to life is severed. The prey becomes the predator in an instant.

Now consider the food typically occupying the human food supply. That cabbage had its head lopped off days ago. It was crammed into a bin with countless other cabbages as it travelled thousands of miles in a refrigerated truck in complete darkness. Then it is placed on a shelf under fluorescent lights where it is judged by potential consumers. Believe me, the whole experience is rather confusing for the poor cabbage… who then passes the contents of that strange “dream” on to you, the consumer. Can you just imagine the journey of any highly processed food?!

Fresh food is far more assimilable because it never has a chance to accumulate such muddled, inexplicable experience… at least, that’s the metaphysical side to another benefit of foraging. Growing your own garden works too.

Ah, the simple life of sentience absorbing sentience… in relatable ways…