The Remarkable Fools Letter

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Eating sunbeams

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Eating sunbeams

and time traveling jam

Jim Dalling
Oct 23, 2022
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Eating sunbeams

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It takes just over eight minutes for light from the sun to travel the ninety three million miles to the earth. This energy, combined with carbon dioxide is how plants make sugar and oxygen through photosynthesis. This happens constantly.

This means that it happened back in June when my wife was harvesting the strawberries in the yard. It’s an odd thought to have but true just the same. When we harvest plant food, we are harvesting energy from the sun. Strawberries are sugar batteries.

I love sweetness. I crave it, live for it really. We have a yard for gathering sweetness. We have peach, apple, plum and cherry trees. There are berry bushes everywhere. In addition to collecting sweetness, our kitchen is set up for preserving it. Best of all, I have a tongue for its enjoyment.

It’s an odd thing, that the irrational experience of pleasure comes indirectly from the sun. According to the Greeks, Apollo was the god of the sun and the god of reason. In my life, I’ve never met a reasonable pie. There must be other forces at work.

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Is there a reason for sweetness? Is there a reason for pleasure? Dionysus what have you done? Does the light of truth and reason have a flavor, a deliciousness to it?

The sun’s sweet energy travels far and arrives here quite quickly. Dionysus stores it in berry batteries. We preserve it in jars as jam and jellies. I recently ate a jar of jam we made in June of 2020. My delicious toast was stale sunshine? Perhaps

We are surrounded by sweetness and bathed in light. We all can hold on to sweetness.

So here’s an experiment. Go buy some fruit, enough to make jam. To minimize costs, buy some from the almost rotten / day old rack in the grocery store. Better yet, go to a farm market and buy some from a farmer.

Make jam. Use google. It will tell you something to make with the fruit you’ve found.

Then, on a day that things seem unreasonable, irrational and mean, go to your cupboard. Open up the sweetness you saved.

We all crave sweetness. Whether from the sun or each other, when we hold on to the sweetness of the world, we’re holding onto something powered by the light of reason and truth. Better yet, the sweetness fuels us.

So.

Go collect some sweetness. In a few months when things seem bleak, you’ll thank yourself.

Also, if you don’t have time to make jam, what other sweetness have you encountered lately? How can you preserve it to help you make life more delicious later?

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Eating sunbeams

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Heather Anne
Oct 23, 2022

I have been wanting to make preserves, specifically jam. I missed out on the sour dough mania during COVID because I was a front line

worker and I was so not bored. Exhausted and anxious. No time or head space for sour dough. I have FOMO ...fear of missing out. It's one way my general anxiety shows up. I missed out. Making my own jam and sour dough has caused me to take books from the library on making preserves and bread. The library is the start of all my addictions. Jam and sour dough represent time. Time to be happily, casually productive is what I am craving now, more than ...no...as much as sunshine. My clock is ticking again. It ticked at 28; time for a baby. It ticked at 35; last call for babies. It's ticking now; time for a break. Retirement? My mortgage says no, maybe not. But I have been missing out on true rest and jam and sour dough. I hope to enjoy some stored sunshine in next summer's sunshine with a cup of tea. I'll share it with my family. I don't want to miss out on them either. They are my favourite stored sunshine.

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