I had always felt most competent as a forager when I returned with something to show.
Perhaps that’s why it took me so long to understand that competence was not the point.
After years of walking the same landscape, I began to notice something new.
These days, the actual harvesting is almost incidental. What Domei asks of you is more uncomfortable than that.
I joked on a course recently that I have been teaching foraging back to front for 15 years.
The first step is to establish kinship with the living world. Instead, we only go to take.
It’s just like the extractive worldview that we all grew up with and learnt.
Foraging also brings an uncomfortable truth. It demands your energy, your physical presence, and your attention.
You burn calories by crouching low to peek under a leaf, jumping gates, and skipping over ditches.
Foraging is firsthand living. You can’t do it sitting down, staring at a two-dimensional plant on a screen or watching a video of someone else having the experience.
You cannot do it in a hurry, and the body pays a price each time. The land opens to those who are willing to pay that price.
And then there’s the other cost, which can be quite difficult to name.
The transformative experience foraging brings when you shift from extracting to relating.
You go out as one version of yourself and, over time, little by little, you come back as another. Not through some deep, sudden, cosmic insight, but through repetition alone.
Lying on your belly, you watch caterpillars crawl over stinging nettle. Rain trickles down your collar. You arrive at a place you’ve seen fifty times and realise you’ve looked at it through a pane of glass.
Something inside you falls away, a spaciousness opens. People often think of the landscape as a supermarket. They make assumptions about what’s edible, valuable, or worth stopping for.
The version of you that needed to forage for productivity fades slowly. Season by season, plant by plant, that person disappears.
I do not think you can rush that erosion. Personally, I do not want to.