Aware of an apple

[Taomeow]

I'm eating an apple. I have peeled it because I don't like the tough skin of commercial apples (yes, even organic varieties). I have peeled its green outer-yang toughness in a perfect spiral, careful not to break it. Now I'm focusing on the inner-yin apple. Without the skin, the yin-yang layout has changed, what used to be yin-inner is now exposed, yang-outer, and of course I'll get to that sooner than to the part that is yin proper, the most hidden, the innermost seed. Crunch. It's a Granny Smith, similar but inferior to the Semirenko I used to eat as a kid. The taste is simplified against the complex flavor my tongue's memory retains of the more tao-like, uncarved-block apples I used to eat. Crunch. Stay on the apple. Stay on Apple, the kind of qi that manifests as Apple. See it grow from a seed, turn into a tree, leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, tree, leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, tree... Crunch. My own saliva mixed with Apple tastes like a tree, like leaves, like flowers, like sun and moon and stars. Crunch. That's because you can't really separate us now, the photosynthesis that distilled sunlight into the Granny Smith and the hemoglobin synthesis that has now replaced the green pigment of the apple's blood with the red pigment of mine without changing much else about it. The distilled sunlight is sinking into my stomach. Crunch. And the distilled moonlight too, and the dark moonless nights, because flowers only bloom if they had proper light-darkness stimulation, light alone kills them, they need dark nights too. Just like me. Crunch. The apple lasts forever. I make my vision microscopic, zoom in on an individual cell inside its flesh. I see some leakage of juice around the cell membrane, that's because the molecules of some chemicals got inside and pierced the membrane, causing the cell to lose some of its energy. The apple is young and strong but not entirely healthy, its qi has been drained somewhat. Crunch. Zoom out, fast forward, rewind... Eve handing an apple (a pomegranate?) to Adam, bodhi tree shedding apples on Newton's head (on Buddha's head?), myself at the age of seven running like hell from a furious rolling-pin-wielding woman and her dog who are chasing me for having plucked some apples off a low branch in her little orchard -- repeatedly. Stealing is wrong, but punishment must be commensurate with crime, and the apple orchard owner seems bent on murder. Crunch. I escaped, and that's why I can meditate on the apple today. Crunch...

[Spectrum]

Damn good apple ain't it? It isn't even there...

[Cameron]

I will be consciously eating some apples this weekend because of this post. I'll probably just attack it like some saber toothed tiger or something and not ge tinto all the details.

 

namaste.