A Breakfast with Elements at the Heights of Habla

       There was a time when I lived in a sleepy, cold town all alone, having the luxury of a lovely friend, a small car, and a camera. We roamed around the places, exploring things no mortals we knew ever dared to. Once, he came up with a plan to watch the sunrise and had breakfast sitting on the top of a huge boulder, crowning the edge of a mountainous height and cutting steep slope that people feared to peep down. The mountain peak known as Habla is one of the peaks on the Aseer Mountain range, which is part of the Sarawat Mountains, running parallel to the Red Sea’s eastern coastline, extending the Hijaz Mountain range to the Southern borders of Saudi Arabia.

                                        

     Part of the plan was to start way earlier so that we could watch the sunrise, and December was never kind to the people of this part of the world. Being so precarious and knowing much more about what was happening around me, I said no without sounding blunt. Still, I had to follow his mind; what happened afterward was a once-in-lifetime experience. It was rather like meditation. And a simple but sumptuous breakfast. My crazy friend had packed everything diligently to keep it hot as the weather was chilling, and the cold breeze never stopped blowing on our faces, facing the sun for mercy.

     A strange, mystic sort of elevating experience swept us into an unearthly trance. Maybe because it was a Friday morning, all the monkeys remained in the cliffside holes, usually fast asleep, daring not to disturb my Buddhist Sufi, Erich Beer.

      Here’s a word about breakfast. As one of the main three meals of the day, breakfast has always been stressed as more important than the other two. The saying goes like eat your breakfast like a king, lunch like a queen, and dinner like a beggar. However, I recently heard about a book being reviewed on BBC World that says breakfast is a dangerous meal. I don’t know why. Nor did I dive deeper into it to get to know it. It may be a cognitive bias that I don’t want to believe that story, even if the author succeeded in convincing me otherwise.

The Earth in Her Hands

 The Earth in Her Hands is a book by Jennifer Jewell that covers 75 extraordinary women in the world of plants. It tells us stories of womenfolk who put their life into plants, or the plants chose them to live their life with. Like most exciting things happening in my life, I stumbled upon this title recently while researching a related project online. It was love at first sight, and I got addicted to it while listening to the book on Audible, waiting outside our university dental clinic for my wife to have an appointment. Thanks, Dr. Abdul Qadar, for a three-hour long session on an emergency basis before he leaves for his home for the annual vacation.

Each woman has a unique plant journey to relate to, which will take us for a ride through the ever-exciting botanical world. They are cherry-picked from various fields like botany, garden nursery, floral design, garden, photography landscape architecture, farming, seed banks, herbalism, and food justice. The common thread all these extraordinary lives share is their love for plants. The book has interestingly featured a bold lady from India: Vandana Shiva. She is known as Gandhi of Grain.

Back where I work, the Saudi Green Initiative and Middle East Green Initiative are already on the way to regreening the desert. Saudi Arabia is planting 10 billion plants to help regreen a joint target of 40 million hectares of degenerated land. For a country almost the size of Western Europe and with 2320 miles of untouched shorelines, finding space for these 10 billion is a piece of cake. But watering them can be the only challenge with poor rainfall.

We started challenging ourselves to pick up the litter down the street and clear the undergrowth first. Then, we visited a few nurseries to collect the plants on our list with just two conditions: they must bear fruits edible to men or birds. And it should grow independently once it has established itself fully rooted out. It may last a lifetime, being drought-resistant and winter-hardy. During our nursery visits, we made some compromises, fearing the price tag and being inadvertently influenced by the winning eloquence of the man in charge to sell the least moving and most profitable items in stock. Our behavioral economics is still in its infancy, no matter how educated we think we are. We collected manure from the sheep farms, got help digging the holes and planted by calling anyone available.

My Saudi neighbor Yahyah and his wife Jawahirah looked more enthusiastic about it than I did. I just took the initiative, but they seemed to be doing the rest of the work, like setting up drip irrigation pipelines and extending the work to the next level, traveling around to look for more and better cultivars for their garden space and beyond. Indeed, as the Chinese would say, the best time to plant a tree was 25 years ago, but the second-best time is now.