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
