The Year of the Blackberry. Is this your year, too?
There are years when nature seems to get the memo.
The rain arrives at just the right time. The sunshine lasts just long enough. The ground stays damp, the temperatures remain forgiving, and suddenly, something that usually struggles to get noticed begins to flourish.
This year, it seems, belongs to the blackberry.
Everywhere you look, the hedgerows are heavy with them.
Branches that normally offer a few scattered berries are bending under the weight of abundance. Tiny flowers have become clusters of fruit, and clusters of fruit have become deep purple-black treasures.
It is, quite literally, a bumper year.
And there is something rather wonderful about that.
Because the blackberry hasn’t changed.
It hasn’t suddenly become a better blackberry.
It hasn’t attended a motivational seminar, read a self-help book, or decided that this is finally the year it was going to reach its full potential.
It simply encountered the right conditions.
And perhaps there is something for us to learn from that.
We often look at ourselves when we aren’t flourishing and assume something must be wrong with us.
We aren’t productive enough.
We aren’t confident enough.
We aren’t disciplined enough.
We aren’t successful enough.
So we try to fix ourselves.
We push harder. We demand more. We compare ourselves with people who seem to be thriving and wonder what they know that we don’t.
But sometimes the problem isn’t the seed.
Sometimes it’s the soil.
Sometimes we don’t need to become a different person.
We need different conditions.
A little more rest.
A little less pressure.
Better people around us.
More time doing things that make us feel alive.
Less time trying to impress people who don’t really matter.
A little sunshine after a long period of rain.
The blackberry doesn’t apologise for taking advantage of favourable conditions.
It doesn’t think I shouldn’t be growing this much. Last year, I only produced half as many berries.
It simply grows.
And perhaps we could learn to do the same.
Maybe we should stop treating every period of difficulty as evidence of personal failure.
Maybe sometimes life is simply out of season.
There are seasons when nothing seems to happen.
There are seasons when we are quietly putting down roots.
There are seasons when we are surviving.
And then, occasionally, the conditions change.
Something shifts.
The right opportunity appears.
We meet someone who brings out a different part of us.
We discover an interest we didn’t know we had.
We finally have enough space to think.
And suddenly, almost without noticing, we begin to flourish.
Not because we became somebody else.
Because the conditions finally allowed more of who we already were to emerge.
So perhaps this is the lesson of the blackberry.
Don’t be too quick to judge yourself by the harvest of a difficult season.
You may not be failing.
You may simply be waiting for the weather to change.
And when it does, don’t be afraid to grow.
Grow wildly.
Grow abundantly.
Take advantage of the sunshine.
Make the most of the rain.
Fill every available space with whatever it is you were always capable of becoming.
Because somewhere out there, hanging from an ordinary hedgerow, a blackberry is having its best year ever.
And nobody told it that it wasn’t supposed to.
