In a Bite
A Whole Cosmos in a Sandwich
I don’t realize how hungry I am until halfway through the sandwich. An errand run, I think, will be quick; instead, I am lion. I am tearing through the skin of bread to arrive on the other side of hunger. I sit at the counter eating lunch and I am insatiable. My body and mind, working together, shared the message needed. Slow down, I hear from my inner life, said gently, and I listen.
The sandwich of focus is arguably, on first glance, simple: baguette, sliced length-wise with butter, mustard, cornichon, layers of Swiss cheese and ham, then wrapped inside a swirl of parchment that is held together with quickness and precision, which is to say it rests ready at the balance of cared for and thought of, but not so precious as to not be quickly and wildly savored, enjoyed, devoured, eaten. Surely this sandwich could be anything — meat, cheese, bread. Surely nothing to write about.
Or, is that so? With each bite I chew more slowly. Hunger is a lion, and as I breathe and eat and take each bite I return the inner roar to a purr, feeling my humanity revived, a yearn subsumed. A minute to slow, taste, and breathe seems enough, if not plenty, to reflect and expand from. Surely, the gift of time, and flavor is enough abundance of moment and awareness to draw from.
Because I have slowed down enough to taste each bite, I have widened my scope of understanding to include not just in the sandwich, but the moment, and not simply my own hunger being met, but the whole of the scene and the experience. Slowing the meal and the moment, I can taste the oven and the grain, fresh and nutty the alongside tang of ferment from the baguette. Flecked in variances of thickness, the butter is a landscape of fresh, sweet fat and grass spread along the crumb of the bread. Sliced thin, the ham is piled soft, light, and bright, and met balanced against bites of bread and brine and cheese. Hidden in flecks of gold throughout the sandwich hide the shine of pinprick orbs as mustard grains dot each layer like starlight on the horizon, while chartreuse cornichons bring bright yellow brine against the backdrop of a these bites inside a gray day. Simple in construction, seemingly simple in ingredients, the meal is flavored with depth and intensity. The complexity comes from the ingredients; I taste a whole universe in that moment, that bite, sandwich.
The baguette is a teacher of effort and ease, hard to bite into at first, then yielding soft on the inside. I chew on the moment, the sandwich, the day. Looking out past this hunger, attention spills into the street to see glimpses of rain and a midday Brooklyn. The concrete sidewalk is layered with person after person, each simple, yet everyone alive and carrying within them their own layers of stories, a depth of flavor and cosmologies inside the moments, too. Sparrows, equally hungry, dive toward the rain drenched sidewalk, seeking some solace in the sole small tree, finding fragments of someone else’s bread, carrying discarded remnants of bagels pinched between their beaks, held like treasure and eaten on the edges of branches.
For a minute we are all there, eating and being, moving through life, breathing. We each take a breath. We are sharing the air and a constant need to be fed and cared for, to exist as parts of the present and the larger whole. Each of us with some kind of hunger inside of us — some starlight, some aim, some need, some intention, urging us forward and out into the world.
I bite into this sandwich, feeling the decrease in distance between hunger and the desire for satiety to be met, increasing my sense of taste, understanding, and gratitude. A simple sandwich — meat, cheese, bread — expanded out, is certainly something of beauty to be grateful for, and each person we pass by in subway car, traffic jam, or street is equally miracle or teacher, too, wrapped in their own longings, desires, stories. What we see from the outside may not speak at length or at all to what ingredients of experience and time are holding and unfolding inside of each person, and certainly containing their own depth of complexity can’t be understood in a single sip of time. Surely, with their own histories, thoughts, ideas, pasts, joys, woes, and present moment, a whole cosmos of hungers, desires, and humanity unfolds in each person walking by.
Surely, these hungers could be anything. The desire to be seen, heard, held, cared for, ignored, expressed, supported, and we are all, at some point, seeking something: meal, magic, meaning, surprise, safety, or satiety, some desire across a distance to being met. It is hard to know, exactly, in a glimpse, or the sliver of an instant, exactly what it is that makes up a person, what’s fermenting long in their psyches, what drives them onward, what brings them nourishment, or what, within their minds, bodies, and hearts grows, unfolds, and effervesces.
When I am able to at once tune into the intricacies of the smallest things while widening my view, I feel most human. In images of the Earth seen from space, the globe is a swirling pool of navy, green, cloud cover. From this expanded perspective, we forget the details, while up close, we see mustard grain, taste the flavor of a well-baked oven, seeing specks of butter, each other, and care. Feeling each dot of mustard grain, each bite of bread, each bright burst of brine I’m reminded of the Earth and labor and the nourishment of the moment and our human connections. Effort and ease, time to rest and rise, the heat of ovens, negotiations, arrivals and departures. Each moment, breath, bite, comes together. It is easy, at a distance, to forget the details, to overlook miracle of bite and particle, or that we all hunger for something. In a bite, the cosmos.
What ingredients make up your moment? What are you hungry for? What drives you? What’s nourishing you this year, month, or season?
Nourished by, Nourishing:
Remembering rhythm in running and walking, early morning juniper and the smell of pine, and a recipe for browned butter, miso, apple time cake, arriving later this month for paid subscribers. Reading Attuned: Practicing Interdependence to Heal our Trauma and Our World by Thomas Hübl and Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay by Anne Carson. Listening to this playlist for December.
From the Studio:
For Paid Subscribers:
Bold, Gold, and Brine, a colorway
