The Heart of Food
On labor, vibrant color, attention, and the rhythm of running
We’ve had creative, grounding workshops this month so far, and if you’re in NYC, you’re invited — sign up here for meditation, journaling, paper marbling, and bookbinding experiences. To start, strengthen, or sustain a creative journaling or meditation practice, try a virtual 1:1 session. As always, listen here, and pair your creative practice with a journal from Odette Press.
“…There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we'll be no less full of human dignity.
There is communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?”
— MFK Fisher, The Gastronomical Me
In a flash of morning I often run past the vegetable stand near my apartment. It stands yellow, vibrant, and constantly illuminated, open twenty four hours, boasting around the clock endurance, should a need for midnight cabbage, pile of kale, or early morning grocery arise.
My waking feet touch the ground and I zip through the streets passing the produce. These stacks of fruit sit silent, piled in stillness. Frozen streets, now melted, exhale into storm drains, and I’m grateful for the friction I’m feel, noting the places where there’s enough tooth between my feet and the grip of the sidewalk to keep running, and do so easily. Passing the market, I see the almost-avalanche of apples, scallions, cabbages, herbs in bundles, leeks from Long Island; even the momentary glance, with my running eyes in touch toward these piles of earth, is enough to spark connection to wonder, nourishment, idea.
Sometimes, it’s enough of a spark simply to pass by this brightness; I will often whir by the corner without stopping by the market, glancing, instead in wonder, awe, curiosity. I rush with wind, pacing my breath and anticipation, taking stock, mentally, of what I already have in the kitchen; more than often it’s enough, and more. In the cold light, running into day with endorphin high, I notice whatever calls out to me from these monuments of food, speaking in the language of color, taste, and potential. To be in motion, and notice the emotion kicked up from pounds of piles of fruit drives a physicality, viscerally, a forwardness. Hunger, a perpetual momentum and there I am; I hunger; of course; we all do.
Those morning glimpses speak the language of seeing and I’m reminded of the vibrancy of food. “Seeing is the crucial starting point for a writer,” Gail Sher affirms in One Continuous Mistake. “In fact without seeing, there is no writing. Seeing is the way that a writer writes.” The reminder is nourishing in itself and any zest of doubt I’d entered into passes past in my periphery. I imagine the taste of root, of garlic, of apple, tracing my glance and sensing, seeing each individual fruit. These seemingly perpetual wonders, these rising and falling mountains of food. They reminders of the earth: how even in the cold dormant ground of winter, something is vibrant and bright, elsewhere in greenhouses or warmer climates, growing. For a moment, earlier in the week I’d found myself in a haze of worry, as if all the color drained from not just my face, but also the bowl I held in my hands, all nutrient drained from my sense of experience. That is, until I ran, and something stuck made its way into the ground, and I let salt run pathways and veins down my evening face, until I felt blood, rush red, through my veins, and felt my heartbeat, and the great sensitivity of being alive. Pulsing, running, crying — a tender sensitivity revived. “Sensitivity for a writer is the same as speed for a runner…” Sher continues. “The only way a writer can be ‘too’ sensitive is if it prevents her from her writing.”
The arrival of breath to lungs is nourishment for waking eyes, equal, in my approximation, to lemon, bowl of fruit, or hot soup to a heart in a hardened winter. Piles of oranges, peppers, pears, each fire-bright, saturated, and alive. Nourishment is knowing these stacks of fruit can be bought and brought home, infused into plates and palates, bowls and cups, days and evenings, giving the energy of solidity, satiety, stability, and the mental capacity for understanding. The momentary act seeing them — those fields of color, those imagined tastes — spark the feeling of the hum of being alive.
Hunger. I hunger often. I often hunger for thought, for idea, for day, for story; I am human with needs and breath and body and a heartbeat, darling; of course I hunger. Of course we do. No wonder, then, that this corner market in a humming city is a miracle, then; all of this is. Earth and industry; body and feeling; orange, lemon, squash, apple, onion, herb, in abundance, piled high in this city.
Have you tried to write or think or create on a hungered brain? I try, but it’s the limits of this hunger that wash over as if wave and overwhelm. Heartbeat runs fast, because I am hungry, and because it’s the days before I make it back out to the market to restock my pantry, or because the coffee is strong, and I feel everything deeply, that in some moments it outruns me. The heart hungers. The heart restores. The breath restores the heart, and food like an exhale brings us back to ground: warm, baked apple; the steam of a hot sweet potato; a bowl of oats or greens. I take lavender, sumac, rose and make a tea. It’s warm and nourishing. I bring myself back earthward. We all need breath, and that which restores us; we all need food to eat, to calm a whirring heartbeat.
In each of us is a heartbeat, and as I catch my breath, I feel the pulse of being alive. I find my own heartbeat, then place my attention on those whose hands and effort speak to the labor of continuity — whose own careful attention is itself a meditation: the lifting, and placing, and replacing of apples, mandarins, cabbages, and stack of berries in continuity.
Throughout the day the market on the corner breathes in a rhythm, too. Pay attention, and you’ll learn to notice the heart of effort and ease that keeps the space humming along. Arrive in the morning, and the day will call out in eagerness, with light streaming through street corners, as the employees stand outside and stack the fruit high, replenishing and restocking the piles of produce. Visit in the evening, in the aftermath of the wave of crowds post-commute, and it will be as if the market exhaled. A meditation on the earth, on labor, attention, and work, I watch these same faces everyday in the act of tending: lifting, placing, reaching down, unpacking, seemingly toward infinity. All day long the labor continues. I watch and notice the rhythm of the market.
I watch and notice and tune into the small moments of each fruit being lifted and placed. Touched, by the smell of orange, by the first drops of salt or sweet or lemon on the palate, by the iron rich density of greens, by the water of grapes, of earth living quiet and vibrantly. Watch the skin peel pack from an orange, and you’ll note the way the oils spray out, as if celebration from the skin holding in. It’s the dead of winter and I think to myself, thank god there is a lemon peel, this orange peel, aliveness, speaking to this city in the long distance between miles by truck, plane, and traffic, between tree and ground and market in the city, and with each fruit the layers of effort, labor, continuity. A slice of lemon suspended in a glass of water is a floating ray of sun.
Whose hands touched these lemon peels, bundles of herbs, before arriving to my kitchen table? I wonder. Whose careful tending of soil, miles of effort and water, piles of time made this almond, mandarin, apple possible?
But I don’t have to wonder, because they are there, day after day, and as I pass by, I can see. They look up in laugher. They are there, like sunlight day after day after day, people working and I think about the tendrils of labor, each with their own heartbeats. People whose attention shows; whose hands pile fruit — the people whose hands dig up food up from the ground, whose efforts hold boxes, hold doors, keep the heartbeat of the city pumping, in the consistent demand of movement of people and food. They are the veins of the heartbeat of the city. Each orange adds up, and paychecks accumulate, and they are the forward momentum: the rhythm, the bridge between each other, farmer, and kitchen.
Drop into the body and it will tell you everything the heart of you needs. Blood and hearts beat, humming through the veins. It’s not just about humans eating; about grocery stores, not solely about what sings or zips or sits hot and cold on our weary, worthy, warming plates; it’s about every other living thing on this planet that connects us as if by invisible tendrils, who also needs to eat. It’s the starling making a nest, the tree swaying in wind, mites in the soil, bees that pollinate, and bright wide blue sky, and sunlight, a hawk, a breath, a cell, a single drop of water that falls to the ground. Trees grow, and reach up toward the atmosphere blooming into lemon and orange, and as I run past the market, I bow to people, earth and industry, that gives way to the continuity of seasons, making it so I have lemon, citrus, fruit to return to, despite this winter dormancy. Everywhere, we hunger for something.
Handprints linger on the back of trucks as if art or apparition; metal erupts in sound from the sidewalk as the backs of trucks open, a mouth wide, with all the day’s produce pouring out; everything we are connected with leaves some known or latent indent, an impression. I often wonder what the days would look like if everything touched by labor was acknowledged; the signs would be everywhere: bright orange, overflowing. Caution! Emotional labor. Caution! The effort, attention, and care it takes to pay close attention, to sustain mind, and care, to each other. Here: the mental labor of planning. Now: the invisible made vibrant. The cost to pay heart, to pay body, to pay attention.
How would we move, breathe, run toward each other, if we could sense and feel the impact of touch and impression? Imagine moving through your day, walking through the world with ink on your hands; finger prints would leave dots and lines of half thought and holding, showing you your rhythms and what you care about, becoming evidence of habituation. Left lingering, you’d begin to see the rhythms of your own living, noted in the places of where you linger, and what you return to, and what you come to connect with, what you value most. The streets you walk, the places where you reach up to to grab cup, hold hand or hairline, scroll phone, or the many times you open and close doors, or where you come to touch the fruit.
Suspend your belief a layer further, and notice not just the lifting and placing, of say, the orange on the pile of fruit, or peach, but the places where the world, like fruit, is ripe or hardened. Entering into the emotional, and dropping down, we’d notice not just the places of touch and imprint left behind, but the impact, the felt sense, or the impression — a language to see and feel and sense the places of our impact. How we poke and prod at each other, words or gestures to open and embolden, gazes to grip or bruise, as if rising dough or ripening fruit, seeing the places of impression. We’d be responsive, as in uplifting and celebratory of the instance of connection, and take accountability where needed. We’d notice the fruit before it goes bad, and honor it, and eat it, and savor it.
Food is earth and miracle, and industrial, and an everyday tether to global conversation. It happens by way of the earth, because of life force, and because of the effort of humans. It’s the conversing of weather, landscape, time and tending and soil, and those whose hands and persistence make these landscapes of food possible, and I find my heart pounding over the tons of pounds of food wasted each year. Meanwhile, I hear the percussive insistence of a person shaking coins in the middle of city streets, subway car, singing out toward the song of their hunger. Meanwhile, above ground, and in the ground, vegetables grow, sitting quietly, decomposing on streets. Explain to me, how, there is at once, somehow too much and not enough; it’s never made sense to me.
Heart is a fire started and kept going through the wind of your breathing. Heart is the place where your veins and vessels meet, and a kitchen brings together time, heat, and if your heart has fire to it, which is to say the metaphor of heart which is to care, to have courage, to encourage, there is a drive. Look, feel, smell, sense, taste, stay present — the fire of the heart says pay attention.
And what else is there to see, but everything? I see the men smiling underneath hunter green hoods in the yellow light of the fruit stand and see my own breath standing still on a morning run. I watch mandarins grow soft on my counter, and see how miles and days accumulate. Seeing in layers of history, I watch how much time it takes to grow something. Perhaps my intricate understanding of it is feeling, so often, the fear that it could all be taken away: the preciousness of this earth, this life, and the ways we are all in this together, breathing picking fruit, seeing each other, breathing the same, air, interdependence. Were we not put on the earth, if not for to care for each other, sit by fire, sip idea and each other, lick spoon and taste fruit and wipe away tear, fear, salt? To sit across from each other, and care? What happens when we sit long enough at the table to see each other, and feel wonder, and see that there is more than enough?
Forward momentum is food growing and a heartbeat that runs through me. It brings me to ground, a pounding of now, of lungs and each other and potential. Seeing fruit and food, imagining taste, color, and cooking, and feeling my feet on the ground, I can only move forward in awe and wonder. Seeing red, seeing orange, seeing yellow, seeing green; I see the piles and piles of fruit amassing, and they return me to the earth of my practice, to the vibrancy of now. Running, I remember the rhythm of breathing like eating; that everything runs on a current, a line, a thread, a heart of aliveness, a precious beat that speaks to some continuity, something that sparks us to move.
Meditate on the nature of food, of what’s nourishing and it will tell you the story of the heart of creating. How the nature of life is a conversation, and about what drives you forward and onward, as in digestion, as in miles run, as in heartbeat, what slows you down. Like soil, like hungry mouth opening, everything that we bring in brings us depletion, restoring, or no change: thoughts, draw in from ideas, meals, sounds, posture, each other, images. To pay attention is to honor the labor, each other, yourself, to notice the generous heart of an earth gives us not just one thing to eat, but so many.
Meanwhile, something touches you, moves through you: the invisible made tangible, the trees and mycelium in tandem, the atmosphere conspiring with cells, each other, to keep living. Your lungs, and birds’ wings, floating on air currents. The sunlight, streaming through the window, brings you up and out of a winter depression. “Your great mistake is to act the drama / as if you were alone”, David Whyte writes. Look up: sky, light. Look down: fruit in the ground, growing. Notice vibrancy, notice gravity, holding you into life, onto the ground. Cut a lemon, look forward, and run into the day.
Nourished By, Nourishing:
Basked in the power of art and awe at Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree this past weekend, then walked to Kitchen Arts and Letters. Breathing deeply, laughing more, and listening to this February playlist and reading How to Cook a Wolf by MFK Fisher.
Let’s Practice:
