Picking berries
Wednesday August 31, 2005
Forbidding fruit
Each year, in late August, I pick wild blackberries growing at the bottom of a neighbor’s orchard.
Now, you have to realize that these are not tamed, domesticated blackberries. They apparently come from the Himalayas, where they survived by sprouting thorns that make sharks look gentle, on vines as tangled as George Bush’s sentences.
But beyond those barriers lie the sweetest, most luscious berries…
So I find myself standing as close as I dare, reaching with tentative fingers towards those swelling berries extended towards me, feeling their soft warmth fall willingly into the palm of my hand, my fingers developing a life of their own as they caress and pluck, stroke and gather, all the while reaching deeper and deeper into the bush, the berries yielding softly to my probing fingers, while the juice runs down my fingers, and always the best lie just beyond reach, paradise almost in my grasp, and so I press forward recklessly, heedless of the pricks, yearning for more… More… MORE…
Whoa! Stop right there! This is about picking blackberries. What did you think I was writing about? Sex?
The selling of sex
You see, that’s the trouble with our social culture. We’re obsessed with sex. Driving cars. Buying shoes. Eating potato chips. Drinking beer. Sweating at a gym…
Advertisers have discovered that sex sells. If you have an utterly prosaic piece of machinery – a diesel bulldozer, for instance – you pose a bikini-clad babe on the tracks and expect it to sell faster.
Military recruiting ads feature soldiers firing projectiles.
Sex even dominates religion. Anglican bishops from Africa, irate Catholic parishioners in Boston, televangelists across the southern U.S. states – all equate sin with sexual behaviour.
And it’s hard to hear pop music lyrics today that aren’t about sex.
When I was young, I was told that the rhythms of the Four Aces and the Mills Brothers deliberately imitated the comforting sounds of a mother’s heartbeat. One day, after rock’n’roll took over the music industry, I asked media guru Eric McLuhan (son of the late Marshall McLuhan) what modern rhythms related to.
“Sex,” he shrugged.
But – do I really need to say this? – there’s more to life than sex. Friendship does not depend merely on sexual attraction. An appreciation of beauty does not require rising hormones. Planting seeds in a garden is not an analogy for ejaculation.
And happy marriages are not made in Viagra.
Sensuality
Our society has blurred the distinction between sensual and sexual.
Sex is, of course, a sensual experience. But sensual means more than sex. It means using all of our senses. Sights and sounds, smells and tastes, touches and perceptions, enrich our awareness of our world and of each other. Everything we know comes to us through our senses; later, our brains organize and categorize that information for future reference.
Sexual, on the other hand, restricts all that sensual wonder to its effects on our gonads.
We are sensual beings. Let’s celebrate that sensuality. Even when picking blackberries.
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Copyright © 2002 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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