Does your mind wander and wonder as much as mine?
The latest notes from the field
The date today makes me smile. Kind of like a stitching pattern I’d choose on my sewing machine for a zipper or pocket. To add kind of a flare. date: 05 25 2025 or 25 05 2025
Steam rising from the fence line. It looks like a bowl of hot soup. Saturated after a night of rain. Now it’s morning, and a cloudless sun rises warming everything it touches.
Lying in bed. I see one of the last planes on route to land for the night. It’s quite late. I thought of the day I spent in a small village outside Jaipur. A plane passed overhead. They pointed at it and pointed at me. At the time my Hindi was limited. All they knew was that I came from one of those metal winged birds. It transported people. It’s been twenty seven years. Are those children I played with in the countryside up there now, flying back and forth from Ahmedabad to Delhi to Jaipur? I wonder.
It’s a cool spring night. Finally the window is wide open. I’m reading in bed. A thunderstorm is rolling in the distance. I may catch a flash of light out of the corner of my eye.
How can thoughts or actions be juicy like a ripe pear, cool like fresh yogurt, or oily like melted ghee? Any ideas? Sure we can experience these qualities as a result of what we eat, but not all the time. It’s an assumption that we have access to seasonless food. My initial hypothesis is that the energy of the landscape has to be harnessed in other ways. Maybe it’s through the power of one's temperament. Or in our relationships with mind, environment, and community.
In Korean culture, the concept of imparting flavor by the person who is making the food with their hands is known as ssom mhat (ssom meaning hand and mhat meaning taste). The person preparing the food is not just sharing the ingredients and their microbiome but also, in a sense, their personality. The same recipe prepared by different people is always different.*
This isn’t just a Korean cultural expression, more so a commonality of our shared human need to prepare, share, and eat food. However I did like reconsidering, recipes aside, that the microbiome and personality are contingent, if not guaranteed, to flavor.
The wind is dancing with my dining room curtain. The entire length of fabric fills as though it’s a sail. Collapses. Quickly sucked against the screen and then fills again.
Reading a Theaster Gates interview from a few years ago. Today is always a good day for a little reflection and self-check. A question I regularly ask, how can I be boldly myself?
Courage to be oneself. I don’t know if that’s advice, but it’s an admonishment. I think the more one practices being oneself, the more one traverses different states and discovers aspects of being. Lately when I’m in a room full of amazing people, I want to be the lo-fi dude, and that’s after years of feeling like I had to be the hi-fi dude. Courage allows you to ask yourself, who am I today? What do I need to be for myself today? More and more, who and how I want to be, wherever I am safe, prayerful, reflective, listening.**
I just learned that the fig fruit is an inverted flower. The tree will not set your typical blossoms like peaches or pomegranates. The sweet soft ripened fruit of the fig only reveals its flowers once opened. The flower is inside and there are hundreds of them—thread-like gelatinous tendrils.
High notes disappeared faster, and each note has its own length of time. So when many notes came together to create music, the result is perhaps the confluence of many different timelines.***
Time does indeed seem to stop or, at the very least, take shape within the hypnotic rhythms of music. I think this is why some melodies will transport us to another time or memory or life we only remember living.
In case you missed…
Being absorbed in nature and play with Elishia Jackson
She was close enough where I could see the movement of her hands and the form that was taking shape between them. There were only a few of us that afternoon on the beach. What we…
References
*Elizabeth Yorke, “Eating With Hands: The Science, Folklore, and Joy of Eating with one’s Hands,” MOLD, Issue no. 04 2019, 58.
**Alice Grandoit-Šutka and Nu Goteh, “Sacralized Space: Theaster Gates on the Practice of Placemaking,” DEEM, Winter 2022/2023, 25.
***Ae-ran Kim translated by Jamie Chang, “Ascending Scales,” Vestoj On Everyday Life, Spring 2023, 146.