Life Is Like A Bowl Of Cherries

On harvesting summer fruit

This year the Goddess smiled at us. We had no late spring frosts and regular rains with lots of heat. A golden year for the garden and wild land. It was all I could do to just keep up with one cherry tree. I willingly let the birds have the rest. The Montmorency cherries hang down from laden limbs starting at head height and reach about 14 ft tall, so much of the picking is done from the top of the ladder. While twisting around branches to tickle and tug off ripe cherries I got to thinking about the age old adage “life is like a bowl of cherries”. These days our agricultural parables are fading with the pastural existence that once dominated culture and our understanding of our place in this world. Most people don’t even know this expression now, yet it’s as relevant and laden with meaning as my cherry trees were with fruit this year.

When I was a kid I thought this metaphor was clear enough. I thought it was about enjoying life and avoiding the pits/pitfalls. The word “pit” itself reveals many of the cherry teachings. It derives from a hole in the ground or even a well. But it can also mean something more antagonistic, as in “pit against”, “pitfall”, or the brutality of a stone in the middle of a fruit.

Now after living a good number of years, and being immersed in this year’s cherry picking season I think the meaning of this simile might be more nuanced and layered then most of us imagined. Let’s start with the question why is life not like a bowl of strawberries or blueberries. Why cherries? If life was made of pit-less, skinless, stemless fruit (experiences) that would mean life was all just a happy glut from start to end. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, it is not. If it is for you then you’re on a short ride to be sacrificed, full payment. It’s just not the deal for us, it’s pay as you go. In life, or eating a bowl of cherries, one must use ones senses and learn to pace yourself. Reflect and relish, reflect and relish.

The other thing about a bowl of cherries in particular is how incredibly privileged we are that we have been given a bowl of cherries, aka your life. Those cherries didn’t just arrive in an amazon box or even pop up in a year or two from the garden. Unlike with shorter lived and smaller fruits like strawberries or blueberries they took commitment and a vision, they need space and time. They were seeded and tending to for many years before there was any fruit. And then, to get that fruit off the tree into that bowl and into our hands, like the life we all hold, it took a whole lot more care and labour. And yet here we are sitting with a bowl of cherries and have the gall to complain that they are not all perfect!

The nuance under the phrase “life is like a bowl of cherries” came from the experience of picking cherries. One part of it is also contained in that other ripe phrase “cherry picking”. The thing that most people don’t know is cherries don’t all ripen at once like many other fruits. Like Apples or Pears or Blueberries, where 80-90% are ripe at one time (if they are not eaten). And unless they’re pin cherries you can’t just shake the ripe ones out of the tree. You have to go through every branch and every cluster at least twice a season. You have to selectively ‘cherry pick’ the ripe ones. And they don’t just fall off the stem, they need a little tug. The gradual ripening also means in any given “bowl of cherries” or life, there will be some experiences that are not ripe. They will be like sour cherries. Then there will be some that are close to ripe and have some sweetness. And some that are a little over ripe with a boozy sweet flavour. And maybe 1 or 2 in every ten cherries or experiences are perfect. Heavenly texture and balanced rich flavour sweet with a hint of sour.

The other teaching like that sweet flavour that starts to bleed through when you roll the sweet pit around in your mouth is that the perfect sweetness of these rare cherries, as with life’s sweet experiences, contain the seed or essence of life. They captivate us, body and soul to keep us going. To keep us coming back life after life. From the experience of their sensual beauty as we eat that perfect cherry we are caught in the pursuit of the next sweet morsel of life. That dream of the next perfect cherry drives us forward in life to eat all the other less than perfect cherries. This is where the discipline of moderation comes into the metaphor’s teaching. Because if you eat too many cherries too fast you get a stomachache. Too many sour experiences or cherries and we evacuate our bowels. Our spirit and body grows thin with sourness and we are unable to find nutrients. Too many overripe ones and we become a sweet fermenting pot, with the round belly and the accompanying gas.

And let’s not forget the stone. We have to take some care in eating cherries or in our life or we’re likely to chomp down on or swallow something hard and undigestible, or worse yet break a tooth trying! The pit is that thing in the centre of reality we can’t sink our teeth into directly. And that will break our teeth (mortality) if we try to. The pit is part of a bigger reality. It is the reason for the fruit. And maybe the reason for us too. It is also the tree’s seeded key into the future. In the centre of every moment and every experience there is an impenetrably dense core. You might see it as a seed or as antimatter. If we are patient and nibble at it the pit we find the flesh directly around it is the sweetest. There’s something telling there. But in the end the pit’s hardness wins and we spit it out.

This is where the metaphor of the pit gets more complex and multilayered. It turns out a good part of the overall nutrition and medicine of a single cherry is held by the pit. The fruit is mostly sugars but the pit is made up of carbohydrates, fats and proteins. One part of the pit contains a chemical, amygdalin, that can cause our bodies to produce a kind of cyanide, but this chemical is also a medicine taken in small amounts. Just to be clear the pits ground-up, un-roasted, un-leached or fermented are poisonous to us. For us to absorb the nutrition and medicine of the pit it has to be alchemized through culture. They have to be cracked, cooked, leached or fermented to change into a non-toxic absorbable form for us. The pits are extremely high in flavonoids, which translates to flavour. The flavour is a deep cherry almond vanilla. Flavour equates to nutrition. And flavour also relates to medicine. So it’s not surprising many cultures throughout the Northern Hemisphere have used cherries to flavour ferments. Mostly I know about making alcohol, but people used the pits for tea and to flavour sauerkraut and baked goods, meats and pies. With making wines sometimes the fruit and pits are used together in the initial fermenting mash for several months. And sometimes just the pits are used. Probably because they are a by-product of the fruit industry.

Back to our metaphor, philosophically the pit’s medicine is like those painful but incredibly enlightening dark truths that can heal us or set us free. Like those that come to us while we are learning to embrace death and suffering. When we don’t turn away, when we don’t run or try to protect our heart we are able to receive the deeper gift’s death (the ultimate pit) is offering.

The pit also contains many essential fatty acids and anti-inflammatory compounds, that can help with muscle and joint pain. As well as chemicals that are incredibly healing for our cardiovascular system and heart. These are cyanide related and similar to ‘apple-seed medicine’ which I’ve spoken of in other articles. When doing a bit of research on them I wasn’t surprised to learn of the food value of the pits because over the years I noticed squirrels and chipmunks will strip the ripe flesh off the wild choke cherries and discard it just to collect the seeds. I’ve found stashes of their choke cherry seeds 6 inches down in my garden mulch. Thats how I figured it out what they were doing. I’ve also heard First Nation’s people processed them (not sure how) and then ate them in a ground form. Given the availability and them being a free and abundant by-product of processing the fruit, as well as their nutritional value it is hard to believe First Nations people didn’t use them.

I suppose the lessons most fruits in the north have to teach us is two-fold. First to be intimately connected to land and embrace the moment, so you can capture life at its best. To be patient until the fruit is ripe, and then be able to act and not to hesitate when the time is right, so as to not lose ‘the harvest’ She has presented us with. And with pit fruit in particular we are taught we have to have some degree of caution around the pits both in harvesting and life.