Meditation on a Grapefruit
A poem on waking up to the possibilities of each day
Friends,
This month, we're slowing doing with a poem that starts with simple food and spirals out into deeper meaning. Last week, we read a poem that started with radishes and expanded to gardens and larger ecosystems. In today's poem, the poet is just waking up, not yet gripped by the “agitations of the day,” and in the quiet he makes breakfast: a single grapefruit.
I want to say he prepares his food mindfully, but it's easy to misunderstand the term given its chronic overuse. Untethered from tradition, “mindfulness” can now describe everything from playing a Breathe with Me Barbie to optimizing attention in military training, from thousands of you-do-you “Zen Spas” around the country to AmaZen mindfulness booths in Amazon shipping warehouses. “Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body,” Terry Eagleton wrote, and it can also bury any spiritual practice under a mountain of products and platitudes. So, when the poet writes below about a slow, considered, and “devout” practice of cutting open a grapefruit, this isn't just vague feelings or “McMindfulness” but actual hard work.
It's takes effort to gather our attention to the task at hand and to use descriptive language to slow down, clarify, and deepen our perception. Confession: I was gonna eat a grapefruit this week in the same way, to write this letter as a contemplative dispatch from reality. But most days I was eating fast food in the car or eating while watching a TV show or just...mindlessly eating whatever I could find in the fridge. It is actually hard to be grounded in our own lives, to give our attention fully to what's in front of our eyes.
But, of course, that's what art and poetry and music and all those deeply human creative activities are for: they help us rehearse our own lives, they can stretch us into new ways of seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling, and feeling the world we share. So in that sense, let's practice with this poem this week and look for moments “when all is possible” in our own lives.
Take care,
Michael
“Meditation on a Grapefruit” by Craig Arnold
To wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you
To come to the kitchen
and peel a little basketball
for breakfast
To tear the husk
like cotton padding a cloud of oil
misting out of its pinprick pores
clean and sharp as pepper
To ease
each pale pink section out of its case
so carefully without breaking
a single pearly cell
To slide each piece
into a cold blue china bowl
the juice pooling until the whole
fruit is divided from its skin
and only then to eat
so sweet
a discipline
precisely pointless a devout
involvement of the hands and senses
a pause a little emptiness
each year harder to live within
each year harder to live withoutTo wake when all is possible
before the agitations of the day
have gripped you
The poem is a litany of infinitive verbs, and each one slows us down. We might think “I’ll eat a grapefruit,” but “to eat” only scratches the surface of how much is going on in this simple action. The poet tells us up front this poem is a “Meditation,” so that’s what we can expect: a contemplate inquiry. So before it’s time to eat, we have to wake—”to wake when all is possible.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t wake in any kind of serenity. The second my eyes open, I can easily drift into regrets thinking back to what I said at that party last night or into anxieties thinking about what’s ahead in the day. Or to use the poet’s language, I’m already agitated before I get out of bed, and if I’m going to meet a meal with this kind of intentionality, I’ve got some work to do!
To come to the kitchen
and peel a little basketball
for breakfast
To tear the husk
like cotton padding a cloud of oil
misting out of its pinprick pores
clean and sharp as pepper
I like the growing gaps in each line, the way each verb of the poem opens up empty space between the words and our expectations. For this poet, preparing this meal is like small gaps of silence easing into his day. They ease into the poem as well. There’s also lots of consonance here that carries throughout the poem: take a look at the hard “k” sound (come, kitchen, basketball, breakfast, husk, cotton, pinprick, clean), the soft “p’s” (peel, padding, pinprick, sharp, pepper), and the “s” (basketball, breakfast, husk, misting, pores, sharp). All of that is part of the meaning and music of the poem, arranged just so on purpose, and if we can hear not just the words but their sounds, we’re a step closer to the kind of attention the poet describes here.
To ease
each pale pink section out of its case
so carefully without breaking
a single pearly cell
Okay I am not this careful with food. The amount of times I drop things in my lap or on the floor or on my face…Just ask Lindsey. I’m a bit of a mess when I eat. But the poet here opens up the grapefruit with intention and even respect. He values the fruit in front of him, and that’s underlined by that descriptive metaphor he sneaks into an adjective: “pearly.” He treats this fruit like precious pearls. It reminds me of that simile in the gospel of Matthew: “The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls, who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it.” This parable expresses an extravagant contrast between a few pearls and a massive field crowded with underbrush and wildness. Those pearls would take forever to find, but it’s still worth it. For the merchant, it’s worth buying the whole field for the chance of finding those treasures. Likewise, insights don’t just fall off trees. Mindfulness isn’t a feeling, and spirituality isn’t something you buy off a shelf. We have to step up and take responsibility for our own lives, and then the real work begins: looking for those pearls waiting to be discovered.
To slide each piece
into a cold blue china bowl
the juice pooling until the whole
fruit is divided from its skin
Remember this grapefruit is being literally dismembered. Which is weird to think about: in order to survive, we have to eat the lives of plants and animals. So, this passage feels like an offering bowl to me. Slowly taking apart the grapefruit, gathering up each slice, and waiting to eat until the whole process is done. It reminds me that one time Lindsey and I had the real honor of experiencing a Japanese tea ceremony. After watching someone offer so much care and attention to the preparation, when it was finally time to taste it, it felt like more than a drink—we were receiving a gift.
and only then to eat
so sweet
a discipline
precisely pointless a devout
involvement of the hands and senses
a pause a little emptiness
Only then. Only after that care and attention is it time “to eat.” And the poet doesn’t continue the verbs ad nauseam (to open the mouth, to chomp, to swallow, to sip on coffee…). Instead he shifts from the action to reflecting on the meaning of the action. A sweet discipline, precision, a “devout involvement of the hands and senses.” Such a great phrase. We can transform anything we do through that same kind of attentive devotion. It reminds me of some spiritual writing on laundry: Kathleen Norris’ The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy, and “Women's Work” and Jack Kornfield’s After the Ecstasy, the Laundry: How the Heart Grows Wise on the Spiritual Path. Laundry, breakfast, whatever chore you want to name—it doesn’t matter. Any of it, all of it, can be approached with this same “devout involvement of the hands and senses,” a practice that can ultimately lead us to a posture of gratitude. Being precisely grateful and grounded in our own lives.
each year harder to live within
For me, this couplet changes the whole poem. In these lines, almost as an off-hand comment, the poet evokes the larger context around a mindful breakfast, to live within time. This resonates deeply right now. It is hard to live within a year, to live within a month, to even know what day it is. So much pulls at our attention, and we’ve built a world optimized for distraction (dis-tract, literally “to pull apart”) and smooth brains skimming off the surface of things. And the older we get, the more regrets we may carry, the harder it can be to deepen friendships, the longer the stretches of time between us and the people we love, the deeper the struggle to balance work responsibilities with family life.
each year harder to live without
And yet, the sheer gift of life, the sense of how fragile and translucent it is, only continues to grow as the years pass. So for the poet, he practices living within his life as many times as he can: by eating the grapefruit and then by writing draft after draft after draft to get to this poem. And we get to practice as many times as we want too, by reading and re-reading the poem, and by walking into our kitchens and practicing that same “devout involvement” ourselves.
The importance of the connectors