ramayana · Day 155 · Week 23
Shabari's Berries
In week twenty-three, your body is doing a quiet, daily preparation no one will applaud — tasting, choosing, setting aside. Shabari's small kitchen of berries is the same kitchen you are keeping inside you.
She tasted each berry first, so that only the sweet ones would meet his lips.
Deep inside the Dandaka forest, where the sun came down only in coins through the leaves, an old woman named Shabari kept a small hut of mud and reed.
She had lived in that hut for more years than she could count on both hands twice. Her teacher, a gentle sage named Matanga, had told her, long ago when her hair was still black, that one day a prince would come walking through these trees. A prince with eyes like a rain cloud and a brother always one step behind him.