And the World Comes With It

Photo, Nicholas T. on Flickr

What is ecology but connections?

Meditation on a Bowl of Cereal

(Special K, Familia, and Wheat Germ, mixed)

There is to be thankful for: everything.

The wheat in the cereal flakes, for instance. The fields in which it stood, green, and golden ripened, the sun that shone on it, the rain that fell on it, the winds that blew across it, quickening the field, blew from the west, from the Gulf, the storms that broke over it, the animals, little ones, like field mice, and the insects and the birds who were intimately at home in it, the farmer who planted it and reaped it, and his wife, and their son and daughter, who go to school, and their bus drivers and their teachers and all their families;

and the tractor that the farmer rode on, made of iron and steel from the ores of strip mining fields and blast furnaces, and the trucks that carry the grain to the mill, and the truck drivers, and the forests that provide the trees that make the paper for the cardboard boxes, and the loggers, and the people who sit around in little offices thinking up what to put on those cardboard boxes, and the supermarket checker who ran the scanning code over the light ray so I know how much to pay;

and the raisins came from grapes that grew on the slopes of Switzerland or Italy or maybe Spain, and the nuts, the almonds, the hazelnuts, what part of the world did the nuts come from? and the apples, I mustn’t forget the apples, and the apple-pickers, and the Robert Frost poem I love so much about apple-picking time.

And that isn’t even half-finished, or really begun, because there’s the milk, the cows on the green hillside, what color were the cows whose milk I drink today? And the stainless steel of the spoon, how is that made? Who designed the spoon, and where does s/he live, and the bowl, and and and.

And I could get a headache thinking about it, because all I bargained for was my morning bowl of cereal, and the world comes with it.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING, EVERYONE