A stream of consciousness meditation …

I sat down and ate.

Avoiding?

Eating. And Spirit. What do I know about eating and Spirit? Spirit eats the world. Spirit consumes all, a monster making atoms and electrons into a feast, trillions of tiny particles like so much what germ, so many grape nuts, so many grains of wheat, so many — I see a meal composed entirely of tiny grains of sand — like oatmeal, llike cream of wheat, the world is the grain in the bread of the mill of time, and Spirit the eater of the fantastic meal of the universe. Stars for lunch, the galaxies for dinner, and the universes as a bedtime snack. Not just a billion stars, or a trillion galaxies, or trillion trillion universes, but the total of all stars that ever were, and the trillions that are yet to be, the galaxies birthed countless eons ago and galaxies to be born egos from now.

The universe offers itself to Spirit as a sacrifice. Take me, it says. Feed on my flesh, for then we shall live once more in you.

Avoiding?

I am not who I think I am. I am every thing that I have ever ever eaten. So much soda pop and candy, so many chickens, so many cows, so many ears of corn, so much Gaia, so much world. So much, it’s beyond my reckoning. Though I say that it is knowable. The number of things that I have consumed to make me what I am, an eating machine, a consuming machine that eats to live, and also simply to have my pleasure. The rodents that are cut by the blade of the tractor that cut the corn that made the biofuel that runs the bus that I will ride today. If we could see a record — a toll of all that we have killed, all the death — if we could see what we have done…

Mass murderers are more than honest than us. The ones who collect trophies from their victims. The soldiers who add a notch to their belts for every enemy soldier they have slain. They are the honest ones. They know that they are killers. That is who they are. They kill, everything kills, everything hurts, everything dies, and in this arising time … could we stop killing for just one moment?

Could we run into a cave? Could we waste away? Could we refuse food, medicine? Could we? Could we make ourselves pure? Could we run away from the killing that we do, from the dying that we do, from the pain of existence?

Even then, locked alone in a cave, eating not, wearing no animal fur for a blanket, shivering in the cold. Even then, we kill. Even then, we die. We kill Time. We kill our future, our possibility, our ability to transform the world into a better place.

Or is that wish only illusion? That is a very old paradox.

Avoiding?

If we starved ourselves in a cave, killing nothing, do we kill the future? Do we kill the possibility of a more liberated world? Do we do nothing … or do what? What we can? Everything we can?

Avoiding?

The answer is yes. We are killers who do not … who are not … it is not “I” who kills … It is not the “I” who dies. I do not kill the future. No choice I can make Now can possibly kill the future. I am the Future, Now. And I will be, am, and have already been, eaten, redeemed, million billion trillion times over. We are all Eucharists now, though not all who are the Body see, not all who are Christ know, not all believe.

Technorati Tags: death, Eucharist, food, Spirit, spirituality, Time, violence

A new op-ed article by Dan Koeppel in The New York Times says “Yes, We Will Have No Bananas.” According to this science writer and fruit book author, it’s the end of the banana as we know it. The article isn’t long and is worth reading in its entirety. Here’s the money quote:

Over the past decade, however, a new, more virulent strain of Panama disease has begun to spread across the world, and this time the Cavendish is not immune. The fungus is expected to reach Latin America in 5 to 10 years, maybe 20. The big banana companies have been slow to finance efforts to find either a cure for the fungus or a banana that resists it. Nor has enough been done to aid efforts to diversify the world’s banana crop by preserving little-known varieties of the fruit that grow in Africa and Asia.

In recent years, American consumers have begun seeing the benefits — to health, to the economy and to the environment — of buying foods that are grown close to our homes. Getting used to life without bananas will take some adjustment. What other fruit can you slice onto your breakfast cereal?

The only fruit you can slice into your breakfast certain. Yeah, I guess so. But the banana is also the only fruit you can … er, never mind.

Then there was this 2006 article in Popular Science, also touting a claim by Dan Koeppel. The article’s teaser reads:

The banana as we know it is on a crash course toward extinction. For scientists, the battle to resuscitate the world’s favorite fruit has begun—a race against time that just may be too late to win

Truth … or rumor? Here’s a Snopes article debunking the banana extinction myth…

Origins:   Once again, the ecological doomsday bell has been set to tolling, this time by folks fearful of the imminent demise of our favorite fruit, the banana. In January 2003, a report in New Scientist Banana suggested bananas could well disappear within ten years thanks to two blights: black Sigatoka, a leaf fungus, and Panama disease, a soil fungus which attacks the roots of the plant. Those claims have since been disputed.

Bananas aren’t about to be swept from the face of the earth by a deadly pestilence poised to wipe them out. There are about 300 varieties of the fruit, and the current fear applies to only one of them, the Cavendish. Granted, the Cavendish is our banana of choice, but it isn’t the only banana out there. Even if the Cavendish were lost to us, we would still not be singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas.”

This may be an instance where Snopes actually gets it wrong. The Snopes article refutes a claim made on a radio broadcast in 2003. The recently reported threat is about the resurgence of a fungus that may not been quite so serious a threat in 2003, a fungus that kills numerous species of banana.

I doubt even the beloved Cavendish variety of banana will become totally extinct. There will likely always remain places on earth where the fungus will not have a serious impact, and it seems that most countries restrict fruit that can be carried into their country by travelers and take other measures to protect their valuable crops. But the lack of genetic diversity in all crops is a great problem, and it’s not unreasonable to be concerned.

Integral theory reminds us that the banana, as with any holon, should be considered in all major perspectives. If the banana is to be saved, we will need to recognize and change our perspectives on: the communal exterior — improving the genetic diversity of the banana population and researching and identifying cures for the plant diseases; communal interior — increasing awareness of the scope of the problem, and mobilizing our culture to demand that government leaders place a high priority on protecting our food supply and ensuring food affordability for all; and the individual dimensions — creating a world where every person might bring himself to honor the natural abundance (while we still have abundant bananas) and treating all the fruits of the earth with love and good stewardship.

Technorati Tags: banana, food, genetic diversity