the fruits and vegetables that made me cry

Ok, so I have a confession to make. I have a new love. My new love will be arriving every Friday afternoon in a rubbermaid bin. My new love is fresh, organic produce.

For me, food is often an erotic experience. I’ve written about my love of food before, here and here, however, I don’t think those posts quite capture my deep love of sensual pleasures. My love of embodied sensual experience is the inspiration for the title of my blog erosophy and one of the main ways I experience the world sensually is with food.

You perhaps think I am a little crazy, and I probably am, a little. But I could not help myself, when my vegetable bin arrived for the first time yesterday, I was ecstatic. I opened it up and as soon as I started lifting things out, tears came to my eyes. Who cries over produce?! I’m not exactly sure why I had such an emotional response, but I did.

I think it was partly the beauty, the exquisite beauty of all of them. It was partly the anticipation, since I didn’t know what I was going find inside. It was the feeling of each item, cold, wet, dirty. It was the smell of dirt and farm that was still in the box. It was the feeling of having been given a precious gift.

This feeling of having been given a precious gift is one I want to feel more deeply, on an ongoing basis, in my life. In a deep, true way, each of those vegetables and fruits is a little bit of sacrament, a little bit of precious earth, taken for my own sustenance, held by many sets of loving hands before reaching mine. Food is one of the most basic elements and life, and therefore one of the most precious and holy elements as well. Just as life is sustained in making love, when we take holy food into ourselves it blesses us with nourishment and allows our lives to flourish.

So I took each item out of the box and laid it all out on the dining room table, so I could take it all in. Again I was moved to tears. I took pictures. I marvelled at the purple carrots and their 2-foot-long tops. I held each item to my nose so I could smell its aroma. I didn’t even think about what it would all eventually become, I just felt gratitude for their beautiful colours and textures and scents and flavours, for the perfection of each atom that makes up the complexity of a single fruit or vegetable.

The most pleasant surprise in the whole box were the two pomegranates that I found hiding inside. Yes, I am easily amused. Yes, I can be a little emotional sometimes. But I would not trade a single moment of the awe and wonder I felt yesterday; for my soul was at rest in the perfection of the moment.

PS - yes, the pictures are of my produce and my pomegranates. You can get home delivery too, maybe you won’t cry, but maybe you will allow yourself to feel some awe and wonder, even for a moment, at the beauty of the earth: http://www.greenearthorganics.com