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@nathanlovestrees

@SrRochardBunson

1/ canonically he would, after the inconvenience of being arrested, resume leading the berry picking party with the children of the town:

@SrRochardBunson 2/ Do not think, Thoreau warns, that the fruits of New England "are mean and insignificant while those of some foreign land are noble and memorable. Our own, whatever they may be, are far more important to us than any others can be. They educate us and fit us to live here" (WF, 5). Global networks of knowledge and commerce were disabling local knowledge and breaking down the reciprocity by which self and nature educed each other, together.

@SrRochardBunson 3/ By contrast, a child's "first excursions a-huckleberrying, in which it is introduced into a new world, experiences a new development, though it brings home only a gill of berries in its basket," were, Thoreau judged, of more absolute value than the most profitable pineapple expedition to the West Indies (WF, 4). In that sense, huckleberries "are of further importance as introducing children to the fields and woods" (WF, 54).

@SrRochardBunson 4/ Long after Thoreau's death, his students remembered how their teacher led them out of the classroom into Concord's wild landscapes. Thus the ending he chooses for the story of his night in jail should not surprise:

@SrRochardBunson 5/ "When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour,—for the horse was soon tackled,—was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off; and then the State was nowhere to be seen" (RP,
83-84).

@SrRochardBunson 6/6 He himself, he implicitly reminds us, was one of the State's wilder fruits, ripened, released, and busy preparing seed for that "still more perfect and glorious State" to come.

From Laura Dassow Walls essay “Articulating A Huckleberry Cosmos”

@nathanlovestrees love it, love it, love it!

I couldn't imagine a better string of responses.

We don't have huckleberries, but I have taken my oldest on muscadine hunts!

@SrRochardBunson that sounds fun!

I go back and forth on these sorts of things, on whether it’s ’enough’ or not. I feel like my responsibility to my son, brother, and other kin precludes me from doing something like getting jailed for not paying taxes, as much as I may want to do that—their lives will suffer materially if I do that. But turning a blind eye and going berry picking isn’t enough either, as much as I may want to do that too. 1/

@SrRochardBunson My hope, though I feel less and less confident this is the right path these days, is to cultivate and nurture those fruits that I am responsible to and for. But it is slow work and it often feels insignificant, it isn’t immediate. There are of course many paths and I’m not suited to take them all, it just feels harder and harder that this one—raising a wild fruit—is enough. 2/2

@nathanlovestrees I feel completely confident in your ability to figure out the best path 1 step at a time.

I've got 2 that rely on me and 2 more that I feel reaponsible for. I love idea of raising wild fruit. I also hope that not inflicting trauma on them will allow the wild fruit to blossom & spread farther than I can even imagine.