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Once the BBC did an April Fool’s Day spoof on TV, a lovely news short on the abundant spaghetti harvest in Switzerland. (You can view it by searching online video for “spaghetti harvest Switzerland BBC.”) The film showed costumed women gaily picking long strands of pasta from trees, and happy patrons being served “fresh-picked spaghetti” in restaurants. Many people contacted the BBC to ask where they could buy a spaghetti tree for their own garden!

DEEPER LESSONS

When we look deeply into our food, we become aware of our complete dependence upon the life energy of countless beings. If you pause to contemplate a single raisin in your cereal bowl and count the number of people who were involved in bringing it to you, going back to the people who planted, pruned, and weeded the grapevine it grew on, it is at least dozens. If you go back much farther, to the origin of cultivated grapes in the Mediterranean, it is tens of thousands. If you add in the nonhuman beings—earthworms, soil bacteria, fungi, bees—it becomes millions of living beings whose life energy flows toward you, manifesting as the raisin in your bowl and ultimately as the life of your cells.

To experience this is to understand deep within your soul the true meaning of communion. Each time we eat or drink, we are coming into union with countless beings. Life dies, enters our body, and becomes life again. This happens over and over until we die, when we give all that energy back. Our body disperses and arises again as many new forms of life.

How can we repay that many beings? Not with money. If we paid each person who handled this raisin a dollar, raisins would be the food only of kings. Can we at least honor them with our grateful awareness, with a mindful moment’s appreciation of their hard work before we begin eating?

Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says,

A person who practices mindfulness can see things in a tangerine that others are unable to see. An aware person can see the tangerine tree, the tangerine blossoms in the spring, the sunlight and rain which nourished the tangerine. Looking deeply one can see the ten thousand things which have made the tangerine possible . . . and how all these things interact with each other.

Final Words: The life energy of many beings flows into us as we eat. How best to repay them? By being fully present as we eat.

48

Light

The Exercise: Expand your awareness of light in all its forms, bright and dim, direct and reflected.

REMINDING YOURSELF

Post the word “Light” or a symbol of a shining light bulb in appropriate places, including on or near light switches.

DISCOVERIES

This exercise is a wonderful example of how mindfulness helps us see what we have learned to ignore. In the modern world we take light for granted; however before electricity was harnessed for our common use in the last half of the twentieth century, light was precious, even sacred. At our rural monastery, power outages are not uncommon during winter storms. As we try to cook or read in the small pools of light cast by candles and kerosene lanterns, we understand why the Buddha included light among the basic gifts one should give freely, along with water, food, clothing, shelter, and transportation. When power is restored after an outage, we appreciate light anew for a few hours, but soon go back to taking it for granted.

After experiencing a blackout, another mindfulness group undertook a variation on this exercise—practicing grateful attention each time someone turned on a light switch. They traced the flow of electrons from the light bulb backward, through the house wires, the lines, the substation, the generating plant, ending with gratitude for the long-dead plants and animals whose bodies comprise coal, oil, and natural gas. Can you pause now to appreciate the miracle of electricity and light?

Light enables people to use the hours after nightfall for self-improvement, entertainment, reading, studying, and creating things such as music and art. Light has an effect on