Thanksgiving Meditation: An Apple Accounting

[This is a personal favorite, inspired by a year spent in the region of  the great orchards of central New York State.  It appeared in my 1998 book A Place of Your Own.]

I know of no better way to stimulate the Harvest Season's deep sense of gratitude then to make an Apple Accounting.

Indulge your senses, awaken memory, and stimulate gratitude with an ordinary, humble apple – fresh, waxy, plump, and red. Take one from the bowl. Polish it to a rich glow, in which you can see your reflection. Encounter its natural beauty.

Before that first wonderful bite, imagine:  The March thawing of the earth and the first flow of sap rushing through winter stiff branches – aching from dormancy and itching for life. The cool showers of April seeping into roots and swelling buds. The May perfume of astonishingly white apple blossoms, blushed with pink– buzzed and kissed by bees. The steady green growth of youthful June. Swelling days and the embrace of heavy nights in July. August's ripening and deepening colors. September's coolness penetrating deep into the tangy flesh, sweetening as it chills. The yellow glow of October’s harvest moon waxing the red skin.

Winter melts to spring; spring matures to summer; summer ripens to autumn: the unity of life from blossom through fruit. In the intimations of the cold and heat, drought and rain, sunshine and darkness, fair weather and storm, envision the roundness of the days and the cycles of the earth. And hidden deep in the flesh, know that seeds wait to renew life through eternity.

As you pause, hold the fruit in your hand, feeling its heft and hardness. Run your fingers over the smoothness of the skin. Smell the sweet, fruity perfume. Once again see your reflection, as though the apple holds you in its meaning even as you hold the apple's meaning in your imagination.

Now take a bite. Savor textures and tastes. In the crunch and juice, in the firmness and yielding of the flesh, in the tartness and sweetness, you know the proportion and goodness of things. Here is evidence of Nature's beauty, bounty, and order.

Remember your reflection in the Apple skin. Nature has blessed you, too.

Let your personal memory quicken and take an accounting of your life through your days and seasons – an accounting that brings you the realization of your good fortune to be a living, sensing, feeling, thinking creature.

In this apple accounting, you experience firsthand a genuine Thanksgiving for the natural miracle of Life, in the scheme of things so improbable yet inevitable; so fragile, yet tenacious and abundant.