SEEING, BEHOLDING

This morning we went back to our newly discovered top-secret taranome cache, comprising an amazing couple dozen trees, to harvest some more buds. We're letting the buds open and branch out a bit before we take them (the secrecy affords us that luxury) because that's when they're best. So we got a lunchful this time, with many more buds remaining; we should be dining on those delicacies for the next couple of weeks.

Most of the trees are so tall I had to bring my extendable pruning saw/shears to get the high buds, you just can't pull that hard (to bend the branch down) on those thorns, even with sturdy American made leather work gloves on (I bought a couple years supply of those on my last visit to the States). I've never seen taranome that tall, because those in more public places (i. e., just about everywhere) are stripped completely, so thoroughly harvested that they don't grow much beyond a meter or two high before they give up the ghost from sun starvation.

These trees are 5 meters and more and still growing, since no one knows where they are but us, and we'll leave the key buds on so they can keep growing. There are also a lot of new little ones coming up around them. The taranome in this grove are smart and have picked an ideal place to raise their families, surrounded as they are by thorny grabber bushes, which snag you more the more you struggle. But now that we know where those are (learning that was quite an education; the high ones snatch your hat up into the air, and then your hair; some of them grow low to the ground and grab your pants, wrap around your ankles) (I'm pulling one of those thorns out of my pantsleg as I type this) we've mapped a way through.

On our way back we began to harvest warabi (fiddlehead fern), which we eat right away in various fashions, pickle, or freeze to cook with our rice through the summer. Harvesting those is a very meditative exercise, their perfect dun color making them so difficult to see that you really have to concentrate, keeping only that image in your mind and not thinking of anything else, or you'll miss them. It's just one level above the state of Mu (nothingness) sought in Buddhist meditation. You have to hold to the State of Warabi constantly as you look for them. I started out looking for and at various other harvestables and couldn't find any warabi at all; on the way back home over the same ground I emptied my mind of all but warabiness and found a bag full. Like walking through life every day, seeing all, beholding nothing...