From The Mouths of Babes

From the mouths of babes
I had dinner last week with my two grandsons and their father. Highly allergic to most processed foods, Vaughn, the younger of the two,sat patiently as his dad cut his food into bite-sized pieces for him.  The rest of us gustily went after the food on our plates, but Vaughn looked at his food a good minute or two before taking his fork to the first piece.  Once it was securely in place, he took another moment to take in the sight of it before moving it slowly to his mouth.  To my astonishment, he didn’t start chewing immediately. Once he did begin chewing, he chewed and stopped and then chewed some more and stopped again before swallowing it.  In the time he’d taken to eat his first bite, the rest of us had shoveled half our entire meals into our bodies. 

It occurs to me this morning that three-year old Vaughn was the only one at our table, perhaps in the entire restaurant, eating mindfully, treating the meal before him as a highly spiritual moment. 

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”—Virginia Woolf

“Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the world earth revolves - slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future.”—Thich Nhat Hanh

”All this hurrying soon will be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.” Ranier Maria Rilke

Enjoy your day!