Blueberries

Have you ever picked blueberries? Have you ever seen the crazy parallels blueberries have to our lives?.... yes, I did say blueberries! OK sit back and let your mind think less literally and more symbolically for a moment:
There is a giant blueberry patch out there. You begin to walk down each aisle trying to find the best place for you to settle down and harvest blueberries. The first one you are drawn to seems too small so you move onward. The second one you are drawn to is filled with too many unripe berries, so you keep moving. The third one you are drawn to looks perfect and as you set down your bucket to pick those perfect blueberries, you realize that the whole backside of the plant is filled with a web and rotting berries. No one wants to stick their hand through a web to pull out the berries so they turn bad before they can be harvested. You are tempted to stay, but you move on anyway. The next bush you are drawn to is perfect. It is filled with clumps of ripe berries. The bush is currently in the shade while the others were being scorched by the 93 degree sun. The time is now. You set down your bucket, sit on your knees and begin to grab the clumps of ripe berries this bush has to offer. You learn your first lesson. As you were grabbing all of the largest clumps of berries, pulling off your best berries, and tossing them into the bucket to see that among those clusters of beautiful ripe berries there were tiny, unripened, berries that had now been also picked too early. You thought you were grabbing the best so you quickly grabbed without looking, and now those little berries won't have a chance to grow. Your first lesson was this:
Don't ever let your carelessness halt the growth of another.
You continued to pick your berries with more hesitance and grace than before to make sure that you didn't make a mistake like the last one. Instead of grabbing and pulling the berries off by clumps, you begin to pull them off a few at a time and holding them inside your hands until your hands are so full you must empty them into the bucket. This seemed to be working when on the third attempt your arm hits a branch and you fall backwards. You instinctually reach out to catch yourself from falling when all of your blueberries in both hands fall into the tall grass below. Your first thought is frustration at all the work that went to waste, then your second thought is all the blueberries that hit the ground would be impossible to find and that you must just move on without them. Those blueberries will have to be wasted.

You learned your second lesson:
Don't ever overfill your hands so much that you are not able to handle the load carefully. My Grandfather, whom I used to get to pick blueberries with, used to tell me that one should choose a couple of things to do. Do them well-better than to try and carry "too many loads" and do a poor job at all of the things one is attempting.
So you continue to pick your blueberries with even more hesitance and grace with growing wisdom. Things are making more sense and starting to flow with ease like the ease that comes with age.
As you continue to pick the berries careful to not overfill your hands you pop one into your mouth because it seems to look like the most delicious berry you have seen yet. The bitterness fills your mouth as you wish you could just spit it back out on the ground. You swallow your mistake and try and figure out the reason why the most visually perfect berry had the most bitter taste. The thought consumes you and you are drawn back to the thought of the bushes you had past in the very beginning when you were trying to find your first bush. You were quick to judge. You begin to walk backwards, the first bush you come to is the bush with the webs and rotten berries on the one side, yet all the perfect berries on the other side. You grab a berry and taste the sweet and sour taste of the blueberry. There were wonderful berries this bush had to offer, just because the one side was less than desirable, it did not determine the glory of the berries on the other side.

You learn your next lesson:
We are quick to judge a place, group, person, etc. by the visual ascetic's it has to offer, but will it be bitter and will we wish we could just spit and run once we realize it? Will we have passed up the valuable people, places, groups, etc, in our lives because they didn't "look" like what we thought we wanted? If we go back and accept them for their individual flaws, will we find the beauty they hold for us and the world?
You think about the bush you passed before the last one. The unripe berries may have seemed unusable to you so you walked past them. You looked down and the weeds around the roots of the bush were overgrown. You reached down and pulled the weeds out by your hands, so that they could get more of the water and nutrients that they needed to grow. While they had no berries to offer, they could teach you something.

You learned your next lesson:
There are people we pass in our lives that are underdeveloped: (children, uneducated, poor, ailing, loss of faith), while we may feel as if there is nothing we can do, maybe there is. In this case you lifted them up. You gave them nutrients to ripen.
Finally you decide that you must go back to the very first bush you past as you entered the blueberry patch. It was "too small" you thought and you didn't even try to see if it had berries to offer. As you approach the bush you see more berries than any of the other bushes. They are ripe and healthy. It is bountiful and ready to be harvested. There was nothing wrong with this bush except for your judgement of its size.

Here is you last and final lesson:
When we start out in our lives, we think we know what we are aiming for. We want something huge and grand. We want something like a masterpiece. All the small things in our paths seem too little for our attention. We keep walking past and learn through our mistakes that we don't belong where we are going and that our place is really the one we past up long ago. We thought we were going somewhere else. We come back to this "smaller" place of belonging and achievement and find that it has the most beautiful, bountiful, sweet, and glorious gifts to offer. This place, this bush, was meant to be ours all along. We are meant to be right here. It isn't that we shouldn't keep an eye on the other bushes and the health and bounty of our own, but we cannot eliminate the simplicity of the idea that our glory could be right here and right now in this tiny little bush.