EATING GRANOLA (MUESLI)

Each morning my breakfast consists of a bowl of granola (muesli) with a sliced banana. While eating this I wear reading glasses so I can focus on each oat and wheat flake, each puffed amaranth seed, each nut, sunflower seed, shred of coconut and raisin.

When I look at a flake of oatmeal, I visualize the Temperate Zone or high-elevation field in which it ripened -- no oats grow in tropical Yucatan. I think of what that flake of oatmeal might know of cool wind in brilliant sunlight, how it might have felt amid its broad community of fellow oat plants (which are green grasses), the whole vast mass of them silently and diligently photosynthesizing, sunlight energy being used to make the oat grain's flaky, white carbohydrate from carbon dioxide gas and water vapor, therefore making something that can be seen, felt and tasted out of transparent gases.

I've seen the fields of red amaranth that probably provided my granola's amaranth seeds. They were in cool, arid, highland Mexico with snow-capped volcanoes rising in the distance, where earthquakes are frequent. I remember how chilly wind formed the amaranth plants into graceful waves, red waves beneath blue sky with gray, white-topped mountains at a distance.

I visualize bees pollinating the flowers that engendered the granola's fruits and nuts. I see the Coconut Palms in their coastal plantations, hot sand between slender trunks growing at angles in accordance with prevailing sea-breezes, birds noisily cavorting in the palms' crown of stiff, shiny fronds that woosh and clap in the wind. And I can get up from my seat right here to go lay my hand on the hard, green, glossy trunk of a banana tree, if I want to remember what they're like.

So, is it just fancifulness, this thing I do with my granola? As the granola's stored-up sunlight energy in all its kaleidoscopic and good tasting forms enter me and start becoming part of me, fueling these very thoughts I'm relating right now with energy not long ago emanating from the Sun, I think not.

For one thing, if my reading glasses could peer even more deeply into this particular hard-pressed oat grain I'm seeing now, the glasses' magnification leading me ever deeper into the oat-flake's substance, eventually a point would come when all human-recognizable form, touchability, color and taste would no longer exist. There'd just be molecules relating to one another according to their mutual electromagnetic charges and configurations. And, farther down, within each molecule, there'd be atoms with their electrons, protons, neutrons and a host of subatomic particles, that relative to their relative sizes, lie enormous distances from one another, so that atoms are basically just force fields around packets of energy, instead of anything that human senses can deal with.

In truth, these flakes from oat and wheat fields, these nuts and raisins, are merely creations of our minds. Packages of Sun-leaving energy called photons bounce off electromagnetic force fields associated with atoms and molecules in my oat flake, enter a human eye and excite nerve endings. The brain combines inputs from lots of eye nerve endings receiving such stimuli and the brain says, "That's an oat flake." But, really what we're "seeing" consists of almost nothing but various forms of energy interacting to create force fields. The subatomic particles such as electrons and quarks that produce the force fields don't really have size, rather are just energized points that can be pinpointed mathematically.

So, this oat flake in my spoon is like a computer screen's icon composed of pixels, except that computer icons are defined by binary code in a computer, while our mental images of things are graphic interpretations of our brains, which themselves are computers, but computers programmed with a language profoundly more sophisticated than a computer's binary code.

And, I wonder: Might not my daydreaming over the morning's granola be the same as what the Universal Creative Impulse does when She conjures the Universe's configurations of energy and electromagnetic fields -- which we humans conceive of as rocks and wildflowers, stars and galaxies, and ourselves?

And, if that is so, as I delight in my morning's psychedelic granola with bananas, might not at the same time the Universal Creative Impulse be delighting in visualizing "me" this fine morning as chachalacas call from dewy woods edges and the dogs lie laughing and wagging their tails when they hear me whispering these thoughts to myself, just to hear what they sound like?