Forsaking all good things that are wild and free
DESPITE falling leaves, autumn is all about abundance, branches bursting with apples and hedgerows bright with berries, from rose hip to elderberry and the unique bluish purple of the sloe. Mushrooms and hazelnuts add to the minestrone of seasonal soup, totting up to treasure galore for gratis.
Yet despite going out daily to bag berries for breakfast, I have met no one doing the same except for two joggers who carry bags to do a pick and run, as it were, when they see berries too big and juicy to pass.
Yet they are selling blackberries in the local supermarket. Which means folk are forking out for food that they could forage for free, just beyond their back door, that is surely more organic and fresher than the stuff on the shelves.
They are missing out on the satisfaction that comes with making the effort to not exactly sing for your supper but certainly sting for it, via the odd inevitable encounter with a thorn or nettle.
But worst of all is that children are being cheated of both an initiation into the natural world and an exhilarating adventure. For it seems many parents are no longer taking the time to take them into the countryside to pick berries, with the literally sweet reward of making a crumble, or tart from them, when they go home.
A local told me about a bumper crop growing by a nearby farm that are “absolutely enormous. You could fill buckets!” He shakes his head. “A lot of country people are disconnected from the country. They don’t know anything about the plants or wildlife.”
Tragically, they are passing this pitiful ignorance on to its future guardians. Many children experience nature as no more than a passing blur from their vantage point in the back seat of a car, their parents maybe complaining about the hedgerows scratching the paintwork. Instead of running wild amid its wonders, they perceive wildlife as road kill.
Sometimes the closest they get to nature is eating junk food by the river in this country town. Even then, many have their heads down as they fiddle with their phones, oblivious to fish blowing bubbles just beneath them. They neither hear the supernatural screech, nor heed the awesome sight of the heron, as it flaps past with its huge wings.
Instead of fuelling their imagination by exploring the natural world, thereby learning about life and themselves, their interest is already hijacked by a virtual one that cynically encourages them to want what it needs to sell. Reducing life to an agonising loop of empty longing and dissatisfaction — and saturating their premature psyches with concerns about socialising that can lead to anxiety and crippling self-consciousness.
Meanwhile, berries fall to the ground, to be crushed beneath the wheels of cars carrying children indoors to homework, TV and technology. Robbing rural Ireland’s next generation of the realisation that the best things in life really are free.