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.