A Tree-Lined Path
Good food, monastic chefs, and the way toward Paradise
Hi everyone, a quick note: I’m taking a short break, and today’s letter was previously published in Still Life a few years ago. I’ll be writing new letters again next week! Enjoy today’s reflection on a lovely painting, good food, and a slow stumble toward embodiment.
Friends,
When I look at Wardha Shabbir's painting above, I imagine a full, lush landscape filling the whole image right before the moment the painting depicts. And then, like a lightning bolt, a single line cuts through the landscape and all falls away except whatever plant life grew along the path. It's a precise slice through a landscape like Smithson's Spiral Jetty or Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial. And the title brings in a religious dimension: “Siraat e Sajar” is Arabic for the "Way of Paradise," a tradition describing the narrow way or path that all souls must past on their journey to Allah. Here she is in an interview with Clove Magazine:
My work develops on and around the path–siraat....The tree-lined path in my work suggests organic geometry, symbolic of Islamic garden design. The association of paradise with a walled, separate garden comes out in my work through the carefully contained foliage. However, the possibility of opening up to a path allows for a journey to self-discovery and connection between the human and the divine.
But that divine path must be more than self-discovery for its own sake but for discovering others—and creating new spaces where that kind of mutual curiosity is possible. So maybe what we need is not another platform but a potluck, not another viral video but a new way to bridge the space between you reading this and me writing. A way to focus and re-member our shared human life.
Certainly, eating together can be one of those focusing activities. Thanks to Lindsey, I've gone from eating beans out of a can as a bachelor to enjoying food and all the ways culture and history intersect around its making. Just this week, we teared up at this stunning essay about gimbap and the struggle to belong while straddling American culture and a Korean family. And then there's Padma Lakshmi heart-filled celebration of the immigrant experience in Taste the Nation and this reflection from the Zen Buddhist nun Jeong Kwan who was featured on Chef's Table:
The ingredients and the cooking methods differ, depending on the various types of energy. We look at the relationship between Mother Nature and humans....What makes the Korean temple food special is the energy channeled to the food. As food is a pathway to enlightenment, it does not have to be sophisticated or obsessed with taste. Food represents the interaction between the energies that are manifest in the body and the spirit, and allows us to meditate.
Not only allows us to mediate: that energy allows us to live, to belong, to celebrate. Of course, that energy in food is also in art and music and literature and dance and prayer and poetry and all the rest too. Physical and spiritual sustenance, that's what we're after. And whatever that energy is, call it inspiration or call it the Holy Spirit, that's what we need most in our fracturing world. Maybe we're on the way to finding it again.
Take care,
Michael
“Everything Is Waiting for You” by David Whyte
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.How to be alone: musicians confront solitude
Buddhists and Catholics on silence
Architect Diébédo Francis Kéré on how architecture can emerge from community
I really love this discussion of food! As someone whose spirituality centers around the Earth, I also find that food is powerful because it is a necessary connection with our planet. Even food that comes out of a package or was made in a lab still ultimately originated from products that came from the ground or a plant or animal, and without it, we die. Thank you for sharing!