From August 2025 Newsletter
Wild Black Raspberries
Who knew there were wild black raspberries in the world? I had no clue until this year.
This spring I noticed a raspberry start growing by my North (representing Wisdom) stone in the special 108 Spiral and Medicine Wheel we have on our property. I was going to cut it down because I definitely didn’t plant a raspberry plant there, but something told me to leave it alone even if it’s in the way. When it got kind of all over the place, I asked my friend to tie it to a post, and I pretty much forgot about it.
Every day I walk by the Spiral more than once, so I saw the bush getting taller and bigger. I didn’t expect to actually see it fruiting since it was the first year it was growing. Usually the raspberry stalk that’s new this year won’t bear fruit until next year. So I was surprised to see lots of flowers and then fruits forming.
When the raspberries in my garden were ready, I decided to see what was happening with this raspberry bush. And what do I find? Black raspberries. They have a great taste, more like blackberries than raspberries, but are definitely raspberries.
And boy, does nature protect it’s fruit! Even the leaves of these wild raspberries have thorns. After I tasted the first rich, bold, black raspberry I was hooked. I wanted all of them and was willing to torture my hands to get to them. My hands and arms were so scratched, it was unbelievable.
It came to me that life is exactly this way. We all want everything to come to us easily. When things don’t just materialize because we thought of it, we get sad, disappointed, and start thinking we’re not doing the right thing, or we’re not on the right path. Many of us have little patience when it comes to getting things.
Everything takes time to form, to grow. It’s like watching my garden grow. Every spring when I plant my seeds, I literally look at my rows and expect the seed to show me something by the next week. I’m worse than a little kid sometimes, checking every day and wishing I could see something other than weeds growing. When something doesn’t sprout quickly, I start thinking maybe my seeds are not good anymore (which has happened to me before). Then Harold brings reason to my life, and says to look at my seed packages to find out how long it takes them to sprout. (Next year I’m hoping to get my root cellar and greenhouse built so I can get an earlier start on all this.)
And now with my wild raspberry bush with a million thorns, that’s definitely not growing where I want it to grow, I’m reminded that many times the best things in life are the things that hurt the most to get to. If you’re willing to put up with getting scratched and hurt and bleeding you’ll eventually get to the fruit, and when you try it, that fruit tastes so good it was worth all you had to do to get to it. So maybe my wild raspberry bush is really growing in the perfect place, in the place of Wisdom.