(Recent post Sailing on a Ship of Thought prompted other viewers to set out on their own voyages. Be sure to click on the link and board Mercy’s ship with her for a journey to Calcutta when it was still Calcutta; and check out everyone’s comments. What your comments have prompted for me is yet another journey of connectedness. This was written long ago but posted here when I was first beginning to blog, and it remains so applicable that I’m reprinting it!)
What is ecology but connections?
Meditation on a Bowl of Cereal
(Special K, Familia, and Wheat Germ, mixed)
I eat my cereal, and look into the bowl, and 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.
Reading your meditation had me thinking of another farmer – the farmer in the dell 😉
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Hi Ho the derry-oh —
Hurrah for the farmer in the dell!
(Around Northampton it really is a big loud HURRAH for the farmers 🙂
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Indeed! I love that last line – “…all I bargained for was my morning bowl of cereal, and the world comes with it.” What’s that other line – we are in the world but not of it? I’m not so sure. I think we’re in it because we are of it. The whole world is present in whatever we’re looking at. And a further line: “Thou canst not stir a flower, without troubling of a star.”
See how you get me thinking?
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What a gorgeous line I didn’t know before: “Thou canst not stir a flower, without troubling of a star.” Thank you, Pauline.
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The whole bit by Francis Thompson:
All things by immortal power.
Near of far, to each other linked are,
that thou canst not stir a flower
without troubling of a star.
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Quite wonderful, Pauline. Thanks so much.
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Nice post. Food, animals and human beings are all connected and we should respect all of them.
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You’re so right, Cocomino, especially about the respect.
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What a lovely post to start my day thanks!
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I hope your whole day will be lovely, and full of good connections, Gilly!
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We are all of us points, dots and strokes in the big picture. Hope all is good in your world today and thank you for your lovely thoughts and words which always enrich my world!
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My big picture relies heavily on the points of light that are my blogging friends, like you, Patti!!!!
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beautiful conscious moment. Thank you for sharing it with us. I may never look at a bowl of cereal the same way again!
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That’s a really wonderful comment for me to hear, Joss! Thanks so much —
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oh so you’re so welcome. it made me think about how mindlessly we go through the day many times.
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We need to have long-range vision and short-range vision and — mid-range vision!
Gives the brain exercise to try and keep switching among all the sensibilities.
🙂
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absolutely
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