📿 Simple and gorgeously alive

Banana time is a place of practice

Hello you, Adreanna here for this week’s dispatch of The Laundry —

Our daughter Ruby is learning how to eat solid foods with her hands and banana has become a favorite. I choose the brownest, ripest one of the bunch, and slice it into rounds. I spent my 30th birthday in Guyana and I think of the woman at the market who laughed at me while I was  inspecting her fruit. “Go for the fruit that the flies like.” These are the ones that look overly ripe, almost rotten, to my American grocery store eyes. “The flies know the sweetest ones, the fruit that is ready for eating.” As it turns out, these are the fruit that my baby also likes best. That woman was onto something.

Its slow methodical work for her, eating a banana, and so its become slow methodical work for me as the one who supervises her eating. I tie a linen napkin around her neck and settle into the seat across from her highchair as I know that we’re both going to be there for a while. I’m struck by how similar taking my seat for meditation is to taking my seat for banana time. In both meditation and banana time, it’s helpful to take the attitude that just being here, with my experience, is the main event. There’s no other, better place to be. This is a process of exploration that can’t be rushed, and my only responsibility, really, is to be available to whatever happens.

Some days, when I’m fixated on the list of all of the other things I need to do, watching Ruby eat a banana is tedious. Painful, even. I feel the urgency to move it along faster as a buzzing in my throat and chest. I find that urgency feels swift and airy, rapid and weightless in my body, the way that anxiety does. Just like in meditation practice, I ground myself in the experience of my surroundings and resolve to settle in. I feel the hardwood floor on the soles of my feet. My butt on the seat. My gaze falls on her soft chubby cheeks.

There are also days that I’m surprised by how marvelous it is to watch her figure out how to eat. I watch her pinch a round banana slice between the claw that she makes of her middle finger, index finger and thumb. She holds it gingerly, with just enough grip that her finger pads sink into the banana flesh. Sometimes she hits the pressure point in the middle of the banana that breaks it into symmetrical thirds. I watch one of her first experiences of disappointment as the bite she was about to take bursts into thirds and falls to the floor.

She will often hold the slice for a moment, inspecting it intently. I inspect it with her and notice what my eyes have bypassed for years. The small, black seeds that form a ring in the center of the banana wheel; the nearly uniform ridges running horizontally around the edge. I consider how nature repeats similar shapes across the spectrum of it’s creations, and how nature loves a circular design. Square is not an organic shape. People invented squares. That people are able to invent new shapes just makes me love people more. I watch the small person in front of me inspecting her round banana slice and wonder what thoughts it evokes within her.

Ruby doesn’t have teeth yet, so her bites are gnashed between her gums. She pants in excitement for the next bite as her grip tightens into a fist of sweet mush. She raises her fingers to her mouth, successfully shoveling banana inside. She methodically bends to retrieve what fell to her lap by tucking her chin and pinching it between the claw of her fingers.

This is about the time that my mind wanders to the list of literally anything else I could be doing right now. I think of how I used to spend my time in the before times — before I spent my time observing someone eat a banana. Again, I come back. I ground myself through my senses and take in the sticky scent of macerated fruit. It smells like the taste of fake banana flavoring, like the cloying flavor of banana Laffy Taffy.

I’m reminded of my favorite joke from a Laffy Taffy wrapper - want to hear it?

How do you make a tissue dance?

You put a little boogie in it.

Again, I return my attention to Ruby eating, my object of meditation. Her hands are slippery now and holding banana slices is proving to be a challenge, though she doesn’t seem dissuaded. I commit again to offering her the same relaxed, attentive focus thats she’s offering to this banana. Something that Pema Chodron wrote in her book How To Meditate flashes across my mind:

“After a while, you don’t even think about an object of meditation. There’s just the continual coming back, and a more and more continuous sense of presence. And when that happens, you know that it’s happened. Usually it happens in little blips and blurps, but it’s quite dramatic when you realize that you’ve never been present in your whole life before, and suddenly there’s this simple experience of being fully here. It can happen out of the blue one day when you’re meditating, or it can happen when you’re washing a dish. The sense that you are just being present is so simple and so gorgeously alive.”

So simple and so gorgeously alive.

As Ruby finishes her last banana slice I wave my hands in sign language and sing to her “All done!” It’s similar to the meditation bell going off at the end of a session, this gesture of completion. I wipe the pulp from between her victorious fingers, and she coos at me in delight.