Like most people (I suspect) I was brought up knowing that there were rules about eating food. One of the rules was not to run your finger round the plate afterwards. Nor should a person sneak out to the kitchen and carefully run their fingers around bowls, saucepans etc.

I grant you that it doesn’t look charming, and ups the risk of getting food on clothes. But at the same time, it’s a manners system that tells us it is preferable to waste food by washing it down the sink, rather than run a finger round the pot and eat what’s there.

Every morsel of food out there exists as a direct consequence of the death of a living being, except perhaps for milk and eggs, where the death of living beings is indirect, but still part of the equation. Anything that had seeds in tends to be the death…

such shadows come and fall on me
from joy to sorrow, like a switch
i fight to turn the light back on
i don’t know where the joy has gone

a single note in some old song
a word not said
a thought unwise
i try to see where i went wrong

the tender sweetness
on a breeze
can turn my heart
and make me freeze

and then i go and sit a while
and lean against a steady tree
and wait to smile again
and see

like the earth we reach for warmth
and the thirsty kiss of rain
all things in nature
are the same

it’s all a mirror of ourselves
dimmed and scratched
things unclear
and things not seen

this constant flow
of dark and light
is just the deep souls day and night
and the turning of the year