There is a deep simplicity in strawberries in a bowl.  This is a bowl I made last summer with one of my primary glazes.  I remember siting with it on my lap, eating the entire bowl of strawberries in one sitting for dinner.  I loved the shape of the clay and the juice of the berries.  That is one of my fondest memories of the life I lived on that farm.

Simplicity is such an evasive thing.  We know we want it and yet we also know that the choices we would have to make to have it might, just possibly, deny us something.  As Americans self denial is a foreign and suspicious thing.

The over spending we do to be impressive to those we think we want to impress with our cars and our homes and our clothes, drives us to work hard in order to make the kind of money which provides those things and then we caffeinate in order to maintain the schedule and then we exhaust ourselves such that we cannot see what we need to see in our lives – and then things begin to spiral.

Letting a bowl of warm strawberries from an afternoon on a rock flood one’s life is a great sacrament – standing firm and tall against candles and books.  It is not referred to in any church councils or creeds and it involves no complex liturgies but it can root us back in the God whose gift of breath gives us the energy to take another red bite.  And God’s comforting love so enwraps us and enfolds us that the long red drip down our chin which inevitably drips onto our shirt is of little account.