#jbobrow

Today during a guided session for meditation, I spent the most amount of time I have spent yet in a single sitting. The 50 minutes were well spent as I needed a break and had been failing to keep up with my meditation for the earlier half of the week. Allowing my mind to let go of many of the tasks, projects, ideas for a few moments is not as easy as I would hope, and so I found a few things quite helpful today.

Listening to Gathas is very helpful. Specifically, one from Thich Nhat Hanh's Being Peace was simple and easy to pick up. Keeping the thinking mind busy so the observational mind could go to work. Metta meditation, repeating certain phrases served the same purpose.

It seems so contradictory at first to feel so connected to the earth eating an apple one day and then go shopping for cut wood the next, but this is where my work brought me, and it was quite an experience. Today I visited Boulter Plywood, a source of many types of wood with all of the cuts you can read about online (which I did). What caught me off guard was that when I am in a Home Depot or any other large chain, I never feel like the wood in front of me is actually from a tree. Just like fast food, it seems like it resembles something a tree might have, but that there is no way it is actually a tree.

As I walked into the lumber shop and was shown downstairs to their basements full of all types of lumber, I paused because something was different. The smell was unique, a little too fresh. The wood seemed almost damp to the touch, as though it had just been cut down. Every piece looked as though it was freshly filleted from a tree, like an open fish in a fish market. The lumber brought me back to the apple field, which brought me back to feeling genuine with my connection.

This past Sunday I visited an orchard in Harvard, MA with my girlfriend. We spent the day enjoying what fall brings best on the North East, beautiful changes in leaves and fruit that just doesn't taste the same anywhere else. What I couldn't get out of my head for the past day is just how unique of a situation it is to climb into a tree and feed yourself by picking its fruit.

On a day to day basis, I make sure I am nourished, but it is rare that I truly think of the origins of my food, or the cradle to cradle process with which the food goes through. Here I was, face to face with what is usually an apple, but today, it was not an apple, it was part of the tree. I could see how it was growing, and that this was merely an extension of the tree, bulbous, stretched tight, and destined to fall. The texture of my first bite was different than other apples I have had before, I could only think about how I was eating what was just part of this tree. I felt incredibly connected to the earth, simply by ingesting what was so clearly grown in front of me. I can only imagine that this feeling was quite common for Native Americans, or really anyone back in the day.

This sense of connectedness, not to each other specifically, but to the earth itself is something that feels missing from modern day culture. It often feels like we are in a world abstracted from the basic components that we are composed of. I see this same trend with technology as an ecosystem, and how there are movements to be more transparent with technology, just as there are movements for slow food.