I love this poem in this book above. The collection was recently gifted to me and to my pal Chris Corrigan from a participant in a recent workshop. Timothy Young is the participant’s uncle, and was peers with Robert Bly.
Check this.
Wild Plum
Timothy Young
Maybe you pick a wild plum
from a wobbly ladder.
Go in between the thorns.
Part them for the fruit.
Then come down the ladder
before you taste
the sweet meat
and spit out the seed.
When all the plums are in
you can cook the flesh for jam
and dry the pits for a rattle.
But you still have to live with the thorns.
It is sweet as-plum-reminder to me that the thorns are real. How any of us humans learn to be with both the sweetness and with the thorniness — well, there’s some soulful living and some matured ways of being with teams and groups and community.
A bow.
Hmm. And maybe a few tears of recognition. For timeliness.
“the thorns are real.” And part of life. No matter how much we *want* life to be all about the sweetness, no matter how much we have grown and stepped into a life of becoming. The sweetness is real. As is the growth and the stepping in …
“But you still have to live with the thorns.”
And maybe, just maybe, there is wisdom to be found in the thorns. Not sweetness. That is a different thing altogether. But wisdom … more like the salt, the seasoning, the spiciness of a life lived in the reality of “what is.”
in gratitude for both the sweet meat and the thorns