It’s the most satisfying sound I’ve ever heard. I can barely describe it, a sweet rain of plops as rice lands in the water, then a musical wooden sound as the rest lands in the canoe.

I push the paddle against the shallow bottom of the lake, finding purchase on rice and lily roots, a wavering gold and green corridor that embraces us under a hot, open sky as Kerstin sweeps the rice over the boat with a cedar stick and give the ripe heads a decisive knock.

I am always amazed at the variation I find when foraging. Why is this rice tall and this rice short? Why do these lush green heads fall so easily and these ripe purple ears cling so tenaciously to the stalk? Why are these burgundy heads empty, and others filled with long, dark grains?

All these questions and more pop into my head and I make no conscious effort to solve their mysteries. I can feel all my conscious and unconscious observations being sorted and filed, amalgamated and reconfigured in the 90% of my brain most of my life hasn’t had a use for. I have this instinct that the knowing will come as I open myself and simply let myself experience, season after season.

It was the same with the blackberries at Hazelnut Camp. Why do these shrubs that come only to my knees give small, hard berries that taste miraculously ripe and sweet, while these swooping vines draped over with huge, plump, juicy berries taste bland and bitter? Why is this patch still white-green blushing red, and this thick with black? Is it the direction of exposure to sunlight? Afternoon or morning sunlight? Relationship with other plants? Soil nutrients?

Some of this I will discover through research, but largely I find myself content to let all the information drop deep into my complex human brain. An ancestral ferment has been passed down to me through thousands of generations, from a time when the average human had the depth of knowledge about their ecosystem that I have about Pern, Arrakis, and Middle Earth.

In an open pocket of lilypads and water I ponderously begin turning the canoe around to start another row in the rice bed. Amid all the vegetation the long, narrow boat has the turning radius of the Queen Mary. My hair is finally long enough to tie back into a high club, and with a Swedish military surplus bandana to guard me from a skin-crisping sun, my silhouette suggests either desert princess or viking warrior.

Swish, knock, rain, as Kerstin twists to the side to gracefully sweep more stalks over the boat. Swish, knock, rain.

On this tiny rice lake I can envision back a thousand turns of the seasons, each wheel of time layered on the other, every one the same and every one unique, a palindrome of the continuum of rice that has lasted for a millenium.

We are movement within the greater movement. And the rice is moving, moving through time. The Mother provides, and she does not wait. It doesn’t matter our preferences, the projects we wanted to do, our mood. The rice is now, and we are ricing.