Meditation on a Raisin

We have the same breakfast every morning - grapenuts, almonds, and raisins.  (Sometimes with strawberries or blueberries too.)  Making breakfast is a ritual of the hands.  I make the same motions every morning - two bowls, a scoop of grapenuts each, a handful of raisins each, and chop a handful of almonds that we roasted just the way we like them.

Today I stopped and stared after I put on the raisins.  That doesn't look like food!  On the mornings when I add blueberries, I carefully sort through the blueberries, casting out the ones that are even starting to shrivel.  But these are all shriveled!  That can't be something you want to eat.

My wife says that as a child she wouldn't touch them.  In girl scouts they had raisins in those little cardboard boxes.  It was clearly another food that adults were trying to foist off on kids.

Pick up a raisin and actually look at it.  Slowly.  Meditate on the raisin.  All those little teeny wrinkles.  Think of the nice full grape that it once was.  Imagine that grape as it slowly starts to dehydrate.  You wouldn't eat that shriveling grape - the texture is all wrong.  But here is the final shriveled, sugary result - a wonderful raisin.  (How did we humans learn to eat all these spoiled foods - raisins, cheese, beer, wine?)

There's are probably several metaphors here but I'll leave them for the more poetic.  I have to go eat my crunchy chewy breakfast.