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What technology takes from us and how to take it back by Rebecca Solnit, read by Laurel Lefco. Lepko. Gathering

Summer after summer, I used to descend into a creek that had carved a deep bed

shaded by trees and lined with blackberry bushes, whose long thorny

canes arced down from the banks, dripping with sprays of fruit. Down in that creek, I'd spend

hours picking until I had a few gallons of berries, until my hands and wrists were covered in scratches from the thorns and stained purple from the juice,

until the tranquility of that place had soaked into me.

The berries on a single spray might range from green through shades of red to the darkness that gives

the fruit its name. Partly by sight and partly by touch, I determined which berries were too hard

and which too soft, picking only the ones in between, while listening to birds and the hum of bees,

to the music of water flowing, noticing small jewel-like insects among the berries,

dragonflies in the open air, water striders in the creek's calm stretches.

I went there for berries, but I also went there for the quiet, the calm, the feeling of cool

water on my feet, and sometimes up to my knees as I waded in where the picking was good.

At home I made jars of jam. When I gave them

away I was trying to give not just my jam, which was admittedly runny and seedy, but something

of the piece of that creek, of summer itself. I once read an essay in which a man tried to figure out how much per pound his garden tomatoes would cost

if he factored in the price of all the materials and the hourly rate for his own labor.

It was ridiculous, and intentionally so, because growing tomatoes gives so much more than a certain number of pounds of fruit.

There's the exquisite smell of tomato leaves and the sense of time that comes from watching a plant grow,

...