how to eat breakfast
and live like worms
devon turchan
One experience of changing routine through eating oatmeal in the morning rather than maybe an egg or a scone from the bakery.
Living with humility and tenacity in a tunnel of secrecy can make a day in the wild blowing leaves more participatory. Less detached. Make use of your entire body. Feel completely utilized.
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Oatmeal is beautiful as it creams up in a pot every morning.
The gently rolling water melting dry sawdust off the edges of the individual oat kernels, each slit down the ventral side, makes the skin feel softer just to look at it. Falling into the water, granules thickening the water slowly. Then, add peanut butter. Then, scoop it with your spoon into the bowl — each look different with oatmeal in them. And set them in the sunny pools of your tiny kitchen. Taste each bite.
The making might not be as beautiful even the first days but as you do it every single day it becomes something of a mountaintop hermit porridge.
It times out your other moments, too.
You can fit in some meditation while it cooks. Get the slow-cooking kind. It tastes better and you can meditate longer.
And oatmeal humbles you. And strengthens you. (Henry Winkler says humility and tenacity are the ways to drive forward.)
Oatmeal is a cheap food. One of the cheapest that will pack your ribs for the cold day outside and a wait for the bus before you walk through the snow to your job - before spending 10-1 wondering what you’ll eat for lunch. An oatmeal day is spent breathing in the comfort of being full on the cheapest breakfast ever made and one that packs the ribs.
It felt better to eat it when it felt like a choice. Now that we are going back to war, it feels more like part of the traditions of the depression-era middle Ohio family that I come from: eat cheap or die.
But you eat it anyway - because routine is important.
I have close friends who do this with other practices. Intermittent fasting, for one. Other friends have eating disorders and this very article is a symbol of how food-obsessed our daily routines are. It’s personal.
In any given situation, you always know exactly what to do.
Changing the routine with a bowl of oatmeal and your favorite method of home coffee brewing in the morning can be a healing practice. It’s a good thing to do rather than a scone and a coffee and a tip to your friend barista — even though other times call for that routine.
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See, routine is only changeable once you’ve gotten used to, or over, another routine. You’ll have to enjoy the breakup process in order to switch. There are barista scone times and there are oatmeal times. It’s the oscillation between them when the time is right that matters.
In any given situation, you always know exactly what to do.
Oatmeal and coffee can be good for staring into and coping with seasonal depression - and that which stems from identity crisis in this time of information overload and the feeling of general poverty.
Listening to musical theatre albums on the Spotify for which you pay rather than the political podcast that will help bolster your feelings about your now “white-supremacist” family members can lift the oatmeal creaminess and coffee vapors into your third eye.
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Meditating is like a secret you can keep from the other people you face in your day. Like the oatmeal. It’s even more fun and more powerful if you don’t tell people how full you are.
mckenzie merman
We can choose to live in worm holes of productivity.
We can melt into the gooey soil and answer the prayers of rejuvenation by slowly munching, guided by the light and the wet. Emerging when we have nutrients to offer, not only nutrients required.
Resilient, and with our strengthened sense of what feels good to follow — we can contribute. Gaining truth from the ground to our foreheads, we can wiggle and bend and regrow when we need to and calm our chests.
Changing routine is good, having routine is good, and following what feels good to our mortal carcasses can help us shine from within a light that allows for true connection between others that will build on and not destroy progress made by worms past.
back to jan. 2020 - breakfast
kate atherton
do you or don't you have a relationship with your social media account where you feel like unfollowing people is directly affecting your life? this is not an article just a question.
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