01.30.2026 How to Eat an Orange Last weekend, I spent my Saturday sending short videos back and forth with a friend who lives 1,500 miles away. We were both going about our days, separately and yet connected, finding shooting a quick video easier than texting. They were mostly brief glimpses of our routines — her sending me a clip of her daughters dancing to Taylor Swift after breakfast, myself returning a video of the small purple cabbage I’d picked up that morning at the farmer’s market, in awe of its vibrant magenta color. “This is saving me,” she said in one of her videos. “The news is so disturbing today — every day it’s just worse, and worse, and worse.” It was true. The “blink and you’ll miss it” barrage of headlines pouring across my screen over the weekend sent my body and mind into an all-too-familiar churn of anxiety and fear. The suffering on such rampant display was hard to ignore, and yet these small, shared moments offered a simple solace. In the afternoon, another video arrived, this time of her receiving delivery of a box of tiny Kishu mandarins she’d ordered from a farmer in another state. The box spilled over with round spheres, sunshine in color and attached to deep green leaves. “These are my favorite winter treat,” she said, picking out the tiniest ones she could find. “I just love them so much. Do you want to peel one with me?” I watched as she peeled the tiny orange, showing me the smallest segment with great excitement. “These are the kind of things we need in life, right?” she asked. “To keep us present.” I told her she’d just given me a great spiritual teaching, thinking back to Thich Nhat Hanh’s instructions on how to eat an orange. “Take the time to eat an orange in mindfulness,” he writes in “This Moment Is Perfect.” “If you eat an orange in forgetfulness, caught in your anxiety and sorrow, the orange is not really there. But if you bring your mind and body together to produce true presence, you can see that the orange is a miracle.” “If you think you don’t have time to eat an orange like this,” he continues, “what are you using that time for? Are you using your time to worry or using your time to live?” The solace of these moments — our shared videos, the sweet request to peel a tiny orange together — brought to mind something another long-distance friend said recently, as we talked about our favorite parts of a particularly heart-opening television show we’d been watching together. Taking notice of these bits of joy, she said, is what allows us to find “a series of tender moments in a world that is not so tender.” This practice of noticing offers us the chance to let go of the future, even for a moment, and find our feet rooted in the present. Though worry is so easy to access, I know I want to use my own time to really live, for the benefit of both myself and all beings. And maybe the best place to start is in any small moment of mindfulness one can find. Below are three teachings from Thich Nhat Hanh that each use the humble orange as inspiration to find these moments of tenderness. May they offer you a soft, small place to land this weekend. —Lilly Greenblatt, digital editor, Lion’s Roar This Moment Is Perfect There is only one moment for you to be alive, and that is the present moment, says Thich Nhat Hanh. Go back to the present moment and live this moment deeply, and you’ll be free. Take the time to eat an orange in mindfulness. If you eat an orange in forgetfulness, caught in your anxiety and sorrow, the orange is not really there. But if you bring your mind and body together to produce true presence, you can see that the orange is a miracle. Peel the orange. Smell the fruit. See the orange blossoms in the orange, and the rain and the sun that have gone through the orange blossoms. The orange tree that has taken several months to bring this wonder to you. Put a section in your mouth, close your mouth mindfully, and with mindfulness feel the juice coming out of the orange. Taste the sweetness. Do you have the time to do so? If you think you don’t have time to eat an orange like this, what are you using that time for? Are you using your time to worry or using your time to live? Spiritual practice is not just sitting and meditating. Practice is looking, thinking, touching, drinking, eating, and talking. Every act, every breath, and every step can be practice and can help us to become more ourselves. ADVERTISEMENT Rest in the River A teaching by Thich Nhat Hanh on allowing ourselves to rest like a stone thrown into a river. On the bottom of the river, it allows the water to pass by. Everything we are looking for must be found in the here and the now. In that way walking meditation can be a great pleasure and can be very healing. Do you have to make any effort to practice walking meditation? I don’t think so. It is like when you drink a glass of orange juice. Do you think that you have to make an effort in order to enjoy the orange juice? No. Walking is like that. To really enjoy a glass of orange juice, you have to be there one hundred per cent mind and body together. If you are there, mind and body firmly established in the present moment, then a glass of orange juice will become a real thing for you. You are real; therefore, the juice is real. And there life is real. Life exists. Life is deep during the time you drink your orange juice. The World We Have Only when we combine our concern for the planet with practice, says Thich Nhat Hanh will we have to tools to make the necessary changes to address the environmental crisis. When you contemplate an orange, you see that everything in the orange participates in making up the orange. Not only the sections of the orange belong to the orange; the skin and the seeds of the orange are also parts of the orange. This is what we call the universal aspect of the orange. Everything in the orange is the orange, but the skin remains the skin, the seed remains the seed, the section of the orange remains the section of the orange. The same is true with our globe. Although we become a world community, the French continue to be French, the Japanese remain Japanese, the Buddhists remain Buddhists, and the Christians remain Christians. The skin of the orange continues to be the skin, and the sections in the orange continue to be the sections; the sections do not have to be transformed into the skin in order for there to be harmony.