While you are eating

a piece of bread, try to recall

the events that collaborated to let

this take place. The ovens heat that baked

the bread, the plowed earth before that, sunlight,

rain, harvest, the winnowing, the being carried to and

from the mill, the complex idea and the build­ing of the mill

itself. The many motions of weather in the turning of four seasons.

And don’t forget the knife that cuts the bread, the metallurgy and the skill of

forg­ing that blade, and your teeth, those original grinding devices. Then there’s

your stomach digesting the crust and there’s the rest of your body being

nourished, each part in unique ways. Two hundred and forty-eight

bones, five hundred and thirty muscles, three hundred

arteries, ligaments, tendons, cartilage, your organs

and limbs, your brain. As the bread dissolves,

many intelligences within you are deciding

and peacefully agreeing on how to

divide the benefits. If there were

discord, you would feel pain

and cry out, but

you don’t.

Now notice the unified

human awareness thoughtfully

living inside your body with a soul

in communion with other spirit-intelligences.

Observe how it sits at the junction of two worlds as

a human being looking with kindness on other human

beings. Some say this is the cul­mination of the body’s long

development and the beginning of the next transformation,

that you that live with gratitude for food and thank­fulness

also for any difficulty, pain, or sudden disappointment,

seeing those too as grace, that you live inside and

outside time as an angelic breadeating witness

taking in this myriad convergence of

providential motions and that you

are in yourself an individual

soul being made from

divine wisdom.

Bahauddin, father of Rumi

the drowned book