Ground into your creative practice this season. Join in for workshops in Chicago. To start, strengthen, or sustain a creative writing or meditation practice, schedule a virtual 1:1 session. Watch or listen to these weekly essays here and pair with paper goods from Odette Press.
“The most audacious thing I could possibly state in this day and age is that life is worth living. It's worth being bashed against. It's worth getting scarred by. It's worth pouring yourself over every one of its coals."
— Jeff Buckley
In the glow of the growing August evening, the sunlight pouring in at an angle of almost-sunset, I crack the molten golden surface of sugar with a spoon. There, in the circle of ceramic, burnt sugar stilled, hardened by the bursts of heat covering over the glow of sun bright yellow — corn cooked down to form custard. The taste of corn, yellow and sweet, in the height of the season meets with salt. Sun gold tomatoes, cooked in simple syrup and baked down, pool in patient pauses across the custard, while basil, cut to angled rays, pours into the spaces between whipped cream and fruit. From the ground below, a glow of pistachio forms a terrain in the dish’s corner, as if fresh dots of moss on forest’s, while translucent plums dance golden in slices across each bite’s tallest peaks, arranged as if a map showing you the shifting phases of the moon.
I ate a corn custard to celebrate the arrival of a new year: thirty-four turns of the sun, and the gift of hundreds of thousands of breaths, the accumulations of words, of miles, and the continuity of heartbeat that arrived me to this now. Beaming in the gold Sunday light, breaking the crème brûlée with eagerness, I celebrated the surprise of the season and flavor, swiping up each bite with the side of the spoon. Pistachio and tomatoes met with corn, condensed down in cream, egg, sugar, and time told stories of the capacity to be both savory and sweet, telling the truth of the waning season. An August sunset can often give the bite of salt along with the sweetness of this peak season; I’ve long contended with the bliss and slight melancholy of a late-summer birthday, the kind where the light, once peak-high, has already changed, diminished, and shifted. In each bite, I found surprise in the taste and texture of corn and tomato, a flavor I found formed in me like the year that had just passed: rich and full of textures, color, and surprises, and unlike anything I have experienced.
In my thirty-third year I watched myself grow. Ideas reached heights as if corn rooted into soil then soaking up sun in the wide-ranging fields, and I felt my capacity for strength and smile stretch and stretch and stretch across faces’ horizons. I shifted states, and moved across timezones and cities; expanded lungs and heart to include all soft sweet and cracked edges; taught classes; sat in meditation; watched dreams and ideas dissolve as if sunlight, storm cloud, or sky; and wrote thousands of words, ran hundreds of miles, learning more deeply the intricacies of feeling and language, and stopped drinking. I feel my thoughts bloom with greater joy, now; I watch with more gentle clarity.
Biting into each spoonful of custard, I felt flavor spark the physicality of taste as it carried on the year’s story, one of continuity and astonishment — how I found, often, too, that many of the moments I’d remember the taste of with great fondness, clarity, and feeling were found in acceptance and surprise, pairing the ingredients of trust, opening, breathing, and being, and the spaciousness of allowing. In the last year, I learned to leave space for sweetness and salt, for the receptivity of love, for life in all its facets, cracked edges and sunlight.
There is a story, in Buddhism, (told here by Tara Brach) about the ways that delusion covers us over: how the discursive thinking mind — our habits, addictions, afflictions — obscure us, closing us off from the soft spark of heart and feeling, separating us from ourselves, the earth, and each other, from feeling the inner glow of sun, or our own steady pulse of life. Through sitting and practicing, we are repeatedly devoted to cleaning off that which separates us from the moment, finding presence in breath, and therefore connecting with that sense of sun within ourselves. We sit and feel spaciousness, opening the bellows of body through the pulsing open-close of lungs, and in that pulsing stillness, we find our ways back to the glow within. Sunlight, in present tense unfolds.
You sit, and breathe, and though you may not feel some peak change or fireworks of some synapse forming enlightenment, what you do grow is a that sense of center and connection — that feeling and sensing into the light within yourself. You cover yourself over, yet you return to your sun, and your stillness. The cracks inform you of your wounds and work, and your imperfections show you where you are human, those jagged breaks are the places where the light gets in, and you bring yourself into greater clarity and coherence the longer that you sit, and steady, breathing.
A celebration is a meditation on milestone, a savoring of time, and cracking the sugar on Sunday, in the glow of a table shared with my partner, I watched as the sugar-starch gold of corn custard peeked bright through its burned sugar surface, the sweet-salt reminder of what it feels like to feel it all: growth, anguish, change, laughter, joy in the process of being alive. We arrive to the planet bright and new and screaming, and learn stories, through culture and experience and the nature of our minds across time, that attempt to cover us over. The bursts of anger, hatred, delusion burn at the sugars of life forming those hardened shells that cover us over.
In the first days of my thirty-fourth year, I watch, with surprise, as the density of atmosphere breaks, sensing as some sun finds a momentary crack in the wall of cloud sky and pours through bright through the kitchen window. The rays are custard-yellow and soft, and like each tomato sugar-lade spoonful, I learn to savor time, sipping the minutes, all salt and sweet equally. It’s true that that which burns us in life can make bitter; it can also be true that what we bring heat to creates a complexity in the depth of life and flavor. Part of what made that dish so enjoyable — and surprising — was the contrast and balance of the sweet-starch-salt-tart flavor.
Older, bolder, braver, brighter — these were the words I’d written down on pieces of paper, intentions and sentences, anchors that were at once affirmation and aspiration, words to guide my thirty third year. The more I learned to open, the more I felt my own inner sun return: an inner goodness, inclusive of all, joys, cracked edges, and imperfections. How, like sky, sun is there, shining, always, no matter how obscured, somewhere. How sweet I’d come to find each spoonful as the year formed.
Nourished by, Nourishing:
Reading Islands of Abandonment by Cal Flyn, and “Reading the Planet’s Future in Hawai’i’s April Rains” by Ligaya Mishan. I cut down peaches, for this peach cobbler from Smitten Kitchen, feeling the sweet juice pool out and around my hands and summer fingers, peeling each skin from the fruit. Today’s aforementioned corn crème brûlée from the warm, glowing menu at Lula Cafe.
