I’ve started a practice with my partner of toasting before taking the first sip of a beverage. This means whether we go out for a drink or we’re sitting down to dinner with something in our glass, we pause to dedicate the drink, and the moment, to something intentional.
Often we cheers to something we’re doing that we’d like to do more of (“cheers to more Saturdays at a winery”), while other times we say a simple “I love you.” It’s a fun practice to incorporate with our friends, too, to dedicate the moment to celebration.
When I’m with my group of close friends, we use toasting as a way to set intentions and manifest something we’ve been wishing for ourselves. We’ll take turns going around the table, sharing something we’re celebrating or something we’re working towards in our lives. Occasionally we’ll toast to each other, saying what we wish for another person, or what we love most about them.
When my friends and I toast, we say our wishes into our glasses and then take a drink. We started doing this after I learned that some studies have shown water molecules to respond differently to negative and positive words–that water exposed to positive words creates symmetrical crystals, while negative words make the water’s molecules react in disorganized structures. When we say our manifestations and celebrations into our cups, we create a positivity potion for ourselves, drinking down a fresh start and a lot of love.
Pausing before enjoying a beverage is an albeit small but impactful way I’ve incorporated mindfulness in my life. It’s one of many tiny moments of intention I practice weaving through the fabric of my every day.
I’ve been thinking of starting this practice before eating, as well. Saying grace before a meal is a common religious practice and one I grew up doing, but I stopped this ritual after the words I was given and the new ones I tried out lost meaning. Skipping a prayer before a meal became a new form of mindfulness for me, letting myself choose to enjoy the food before me without performing an action that had become rote and stale.
And yet, after time has passed and I’ve carved out a spirituality that resonates with my soul, I am intrigued by the thought of extending my beverage toast to my meals, though instead of thanking a deity, I’d like to thank the food itself.
Last night, for instance, I was preparing some trout for dinner. My partner and I rarely eat meat and hardly ever cook it. Usually we buy salmon or cod if we cook fish, but this time we chose trout, and I was minorly horrified to see the fins and tail stub still attached to the skin.
I became vegetarian about six years ago when I decided to stop separating the concept of meat from the animals it comes from. It wasn’t the concept of eating animals that bothered me; it was the fact that we often use separate language for the meat product than for the animal, like beef for cow and pork for pigs. I took a pause from eating meat for several reasons, but one of them was that I didn’t like the separation between me and the animal’s life, the way I was mindlessly eating something when I had no idea how it had been treated during life and death.
I’ve started incorporating meat back into my diet in (very) small amounts lately, but I still am heavily aware of the sourcing of the meat, and I always feel a bit icky when I don’t know where the meat comes from.
In the case of my trout, I was pretty sure it was local, since we bought it from a co-op and trout are found in Minnesota waters. But looking at the fins and tail, I was so aware that this was a fish, not just the meat I was about to eat. I felt a bit strange seasoning this thing that had once been living, so as I was sprinkling it with oregano and thyme, I thanked it aloud for giving us its life, so that we could be nourished.
In her bestselling book Braiding Sweetgrass, botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about this mindfulness of gratitude for the objects around us, including our food. To her, this mindfulness comes in the form of recognizing the source of life in everything surrounding us. “To consider the tree in the Kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect? Once you start, it’s hard to stop, and you begin to feel yourself awash in gifts.”
I’ve long been fascinated by the idea of sourcing, this concept of following that thread of life in everything. When I started my blog, I called it “Earth to Self” in honor of this thread of life that begins in the earth and finds its way to us through several avenues, and how this requires awareness to recognize in our industrialized society. Kimmerer further writes:
I open the cupboard, a likely place for gifts. I think, "I greet you, jar of jam. You glass who once was sand upon the beach, washed back and forth and bathed in foam and seagull cries, but who are formed into a glass until you once again return to the sea. And you berries, plump in your June-ness, now in my February pantry. And you, sugar, so far from your Caribbean home–thanks for making the trip."
In that awareness, looking over the objects on my desk–the basket, the candle, the paper–I delight in following their origins back to the ground. I twirl a pencil–a magic wand lathed from incense cedar–between my fingers. The willow bark in the aspirin. Even the metal of my lamp asks me to consider its roots in the strata of the Earth.
When I think about an ideal food system, I imagine a network in which I can trace the thread of life through everything I consume back to the earth. That trout was either farmed or caught wild in a river by a human being with a life, with dreams and sorrows. It was transported by someone to the co-op, where it was weighed and wrapped for me by another person. I think about the potatoes that I cooked, that a farmer planted and grew and harvested, that were transported to the co-op where I purchased them. I think about the soil and all the microorganisms that live in it, making it a place where potatoes can thrive. I think about the rain that watered the soil, the clouds that formed in the sky that work within the water cycle I learned about in second grade–condensation, precipitation, evaporation. I think about this planet that sustains all of us, billions and billions of living organisms.
And so, I think I will start taking a moment before food enters my mouth to whisper my gratitude, a thanks to the earth that provides life in so many forms, to the people who labor alongside the planet to grow, raise, and hunt food, for the people who spend their days working in grocery stores to provide that food for the community.
As I pause in gratitude, I also am reminded of my continuing goal to shorten that trail between food and earth, to shop at the farmers market and to spend my money on food I know has been grown in good principle, with humanity and regenerative farming, with mindfulness and respect for the Great Economy. And when the July sun ripens the tomatoes on the vines in my backyard, I’ll pause to say thank you before I pluck them. I’ll give thanks to the sun and the rain and the worms in the soil as I chop up the tomatoes for my panzanella. I’ll lift a fresh Bloody Mary to my partner and say into the glass, “To more of this. I love you.”
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