Free to be bitter

The season's grapefruits have brought much rapture. Whilst cutting them, they spray me, I am obliged to slurp the overflow before I can dare to prise segments of the flesh out with my fingers or a spoon. They have given the phrase 'to hold water' a whole new meaning!

My mother used to entice little me to eat grapefruit by disguising their bitter taste under a hilly topography of sugar, which immediately became wet and translucent as the crystals sank into the embrace of the juice.

My adult tongue, however, scorns such deceptions. Neither sugar nor milk in my coffee, please. I ward off colds and flu (including covid, by the way) with infusions of African wormwood, known also under the Afrikaans names Wilde els, or Bitterels. And oh, it is bitter - you just know it's good for you, equally as that legendary cleanser and healer, the bitter aloe.

Of course, the buds dispersed over your tongue, which hold your ability to taste bitterness, have an emotional and mental equivalent.

Bitter is the absence of God, of hope, of love and faith. This absence was felt even by Christ on the cross momentarily and is thus, surely, an emblem for the vital part it plays in human experience. 

Bitter it is to turn your eyes away from Christ on His cross, because you then immediately become aware of your own. Bitter purges me of sweetness as a disguise, it forces me to face the fact that, suddenly and inexplicably, my prayers ring hollow and my heart feels like a scar. Neither milk nor sugar please: my husband died, my mother is paralysed, my father has dementia, I've no stable income nor home, etc.etc.

Such a moment of darkness, if it extends, easily deteriorates into depression or resentment and so loses its medicine. (An excess of Bitterels will also make you sick and too much citrus gives you the runs.)

But if I treat the absence of God, the loss of connection with Beneficence (however you conceptualise it), as a living season of juicy grapefruit, the bitterness on my tongue reveals itself as a pearl and my heart-scar starts shimmering again! I can share the dawn with my beloved, and even with you, my reader!

Bitterness is a fast, a purge from safety and security, from harmony and confidence and trust. It frees you up, vaults you on. Just don't turn it into home, but see it as a spa. And let that metaphor hold water.