Flesh and Dream

Ninety-seven percent humidity, the stars dim through the smoky, post-apocalyptic haze. The body says wait.

I ran this morning two hours later than usual, after eating, instead of before. Much to my surprise, the world didn’t end. Then again, it might already have ended, and my run might have been a dream. Dreaming after the world ends — yes, maybe that’s what living is really about.

Oats, spelt, barley, soaked overnight. After cooking, eaten warm with peanut butter, raisins, chia seed, golden flax seed meal, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, blueberries, and honey. And so what we eat becomes flesh and dream.

It’s a crime against good food to eat it only to cheat one another and wage war.

With the willful consumption of unhealthy food, though, maybe such crime is inevitable.

Once upon a time, your letter might have taken days to write and weeks to cross the ocean; now, here it is on my computer screen, seconds after you sent what took you only minutes to write. And the subject? How little we’ve changed.

Read the fifty-eighth chapter of Middlemarch.

October 15, 2023.

[ 1898 ]