Consumption

Over the years, I've eaten a lot of things: words, junk food, vegetables, the bread of life, my pride.  Many of those things have also been eating me.  My daughter and I have toyed with going vegan or at least vegetarian for several years.  We both like meat and don't have any harsh feelings toward our fellow carnivores.  After all, I came from solid rural folk where a meal wasn't a meal unless there was some kind of meat on the table except, of course, for those Lenten Fridays and Ash Wednesdays.  Currently,  I'm married to a carnivore who believes that he needs protein from meat.  In his mind, his life depends upon it.  Maybe it does.  Sometimes believing is all that is needed to make something real.

For me, real evidence keeps adding up.  My aging body is in decline.  I'm sure this decline is a bit premature.  My weakest points have been created by a diet that has had little regard for optimal health.  I've been trying to consume what I feel I've lacked.  Food has been love, comfort, and companion.  Food is really none of those things, at least, unless I believe it to be and I have. 

So what happens one morning when snow gives you a reason to have a sudden day off, and you think about your relationship to food and realize that what you've been eating has really been eating you?  What do you do with that awareness?  Embrace radical change?  It's a nice notion but one that is often doomed to fail.  Novelty is difficult to sustain over time, especially as the new wears off.

Yet, at the moment, this idea is consuming me.  It spins around my cranium, like a mouse trapped in a 5-gallon bucket.  There is no way out.  I've got to sit down, talk to this mouse and figure out if it can be saved.  Mice can be very cute.  They also can be a darned nuisance.  Many earn their way into a trap or the jaws of a cat.  "Ah, I'm on to you evil mouse distraction.  You're trying to lure me away from my point."
Under my breath, I mumble, "Where's my "mind cat" when you need her?"
But the mouse is so cute, so alive, so helpless as it tries to scramble up the slippery sides of the bucket.  It would be a waste of a tiny life for it to die in these attempts to escape.

This tiny mouse distracts and consumes me.  It wants to show me something.  It points up over the edge of the bucket.  "That is where the rubber hits the road.  That is the real world, Baby.  This bucket isn't where it's at.  You've got to get into the race, girl.  You've got to take action.  You've got to show them what you're made of or they'll eat you and spit you out." 
With one mighty leap, this tiny mouse and sometime beat poet, makes it over the edge.  As he scampers away, he calls back to me, "Don't wait too long to get out of that bucket.  You're burning daylight."
For a rodent, my new mouse friend, is pretty smart.  I call, after him,  "Who's they and what's this talk of being eaten?"
He doesn't hear me.

I slump to the bottom of the bucket in a pensive heap.  "What's been eating me?", I wonder.   This thought makes me angry.  "Just where am I on the food chain?  Am I consumer or the consumed?" 
The alpha beast in me wants to always be at the top.  I sit with my anger and watch it fade.  I know the answer to my question.  I say, "I am both" to no one but myself.

The walls of the bucket fade and I stand alone with the world and my life before me.  I am consumer and the consumed.  I want to be consumed by only the best.  I want to consume what's best for me.  Filled with a ravenous hunger, I start walking toward another day, another meal, another life.