Hi, it’s Brilliant.
The poet Allen Ginsberg said this before meals:
“We take now this food, the suffering of many forms of life, the pain of many people. May we be worthy.”
I learned it from David Breeden, a poet, former minister, and hospital chaplain I interviewed for Reclaiming Prayer. He learned it from Ginsberg himself.
It resonated with me, because it’s so close to something I already do.
Years ago, as an exchange student in Japan, I learned that before every meal, everyone at the table puts their hands together, bows a little, and says itadakimasu. The literal translation is “I humbly receive.” Knowing the Japanese sensibility for nuance and flourish, I tend to think it’s actually closer to, “I now humbly partake of this food which has been so graciously prepared for my benefit.”
It’s offered to everyone and everything that made the meal possible: the cook, the farmer, the fish, and the sun and rain and soil that grew it all.
I brought it home with me, and I’ve said it before I eat ever since, or tried to. It isn’t a prayer the way I was raised to pray. It’s a single word. But it’s a way of acknowledging how much I depend on — and, I hope, of feeling some gratitude for — the countless things that combine, again and again, to keep me alive.
During my studies as an Asian Studies major, I learned that in a famine in China, some people grew so hungry they ate dirt. They died with dirt in their bellies.
That’s dark, I know. But whenever there’s food in front of me, I try to remember that I’m not in that place — and how many people have been.
I’ve spent time at the retreat center Sadhguru founded near McMinnville, Tennessee. By the dining hall there’s a sign. I captured those words.
“How food goes into you, from whose hands it comes to you, how you eat it, how you approach it, all these things are important. Above all, the food you eat is life. Other forms are giving up their life to sustain us. If we can eat with enormous gratitude for all the living things which give up their life to sustain our lives, food will behave in a very different way within you.”
I don’t know if what Sadhguru said is literally true. I like to think it is. What I can say for sure is that my experience of eating is different when I remain mindful and grateful than when I don’t. And I suspect that it’s true for you, too.
From the Commonplace Book
“What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us. What we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.” — attributed to Albert Pine
Further Down the Rabbit Hole
Veritasium is a YouTube channel run by Derek Muller, a science communicator with about twenty-one million subscribers who makes long, careful videos about how things actually work. One of his is called The Closest Thing We Have to Alien Technology — fifty-five minutes on a single device: the machine ASML builds in the Netherlands that prints the most advanced computer chips on earth. It costs $400 million. Only one company in the world can make it.
Roughly how it works: a droplet of molten tin the size of a blood cell is fired across a chamber and hit by a laser, fifty thousand times a second. Each hit produces a flash of light hotter than the surface of the sun, which bounces off the smoothest mirrors ever made and burns a pattern onto a silicon wafer. That pattern becomes the chip in your phone, your car, and the computer I used to write this newsletter.
I watched it thinking about that sign in Tennessee. From whose hands it comes to you. Thousands of engineers over thirty years, so that I can type this and you can read it.