I fell in love with a strawberry. I don’t know how else to describe it. I was at a retreat in the Colorado Rockies with six other women. We were sitting in camp chairs that wobbled on uneven ground, wearing hats to protect our eyes from the sun, and we could hear a tributary of the Arkansas River in the background. Writer and former CENTURY editor Amy Frykholm was leading this portion of the retreat, and she gave us each a strawberry and invited us to behold it. She read from her book Journey to the Wild Heart, “Beholding is the practice of being in the presence of something or someone and contemplating it, allowing your own reality to be penetrated by the reality of this other.”
At first, I felt a little silly. It was just a strawberry. I’ve seen thousands of strawberries. I knew what a strawberry was. But as I took time to consider it, to look at it, to experience it, allowing its reality to penetrate my own, I noticed so much. It was surprisingly hairy. The leaves were fuzzy, and each seed had a miniature whisker. Each seed was nestled in a tiny divot, and the seeds were in tidy rows, as if carefully placed by an elf with tweezers. I smelled the strawberry. I tenderly licked the strawberry. But I couldn’t bring myself to actually take a bite. When the exercise was over, I kept her for a day, then the next morning I released her into the river.
I don’t think of myself as a woo-woo person, but something happens when we turn and notice, really notice. We discover we are on holy ground.
