Sitting quietly, my morning ritual. Moving gently on the glider rocker that Mom would have loved. Plate on my lap
And on that plate
Is the world.
The little circle of flaky bread claims to be a croissant, though I doubt any patissier would honor it with the name. Still, it is my breakfast, and deserves attention.
It connects me to eternity.
As I eat, my mind turns to the young cashier in the grocery store who sold it to me,
and the woman with the rack of frozen food who stocked them in the freezer where I found them.
Someone loaded them off of a truck that another drove from a warehouse to the store.
Creative people designed a box, developed graphics, invented machines to pack and preserve this little sandwich.
Engineers and chemists turned to forests and laboratories to create the ink the printer used to decorate the package.
Somewhere, eggs and flour and salt and sugar were assembled in a recipe devised by artists whose medium is the food we eat.
The flour was milled from wheat harvested by giant machines driven by people whose paths are guided by ancient skills, and by technologies that did not exist 5 years ago.
The roots of that wheat stretch like loving arms into the soil to drink of her water and feast on her minerals.
Matter that was created before Earth was formed lies just beneath her surface, ready to play its ever-changing role in the ever-changing universe.
Today, I will eat this little piece of eternity, and it will help me to live and move and be in the world.
Some of it, I will use. Some, I will store. Tomorrow, I will return some of it to the earth where it will become a new part of creation.
One day, I will do the same. My muscles and organs and breath and bones will return to the earth and sky and sea. Maybe I will help to feed a small part of a field of wheat.
And in that shaft of grass or squirt of ink or drop of machine oil or somewhere else I cannot imagine, I will be born again.
Bon appétit.
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