Fight 4 Taste

 It was my first time tonight making Oyakodon, a Japanese rice, chicken and egg dish. Soy sauce, mirin,  saki and onion lend beautiful savory flavors while the eggs silkiness is almost custard like. My first try tasted great, but it it wasn’t the prettiest. I will improve. This dish is worth it.

 Remember when you were young, and shown like the sun. Shine on you crazy diamond.  -Shine on You Crazy Diamond, Pink Floyd, 1975, Wish You Were Here album. There was something about naivety that made it work back in the old days. $100 trips across the United States while eating food that was absolutely void of taste and nutrition. The old saying, ignorance is bliss certainly had its benefits back then. I cannot begin to imagine the things that I have missed out on. I wonder, did they even exist though? We all know that in the last 30 years, food has been an absolute revolution. The types of food that I long to learn more about did exist. It is traditional foods from around the globe that I find so fascinating. I know that without modern media my learning about these types of culinary discoveries would be restricted to books, and maybe an occasional travel show on PBS. Donna said to me yesterday, “Oh to be 20 years younger!” It was said in the context of all the creative thing...

 What is it that keeps bringing me back to food? Of course I love the tastes. I love the opportunity it gives us to create. But there is something so much deeper. Food brings people together. It is marriages, it is births and deaths. It is healing, and not only physically, but socially. In lands where people are polarized due to global labels and perceived imbalances, food brings love unifying those who are separated by their labels. Estrangement and alienation fall away like autumn leaves when time is taken to be closer to someone that we do not understand. Food is the finest way to bridge the gaps and close the discrepancy. Mother’s all over the world call a truce, everyone laying down their weapons of ignorance to show respect and to finally step into the light of finding we have more in common with each other than we do not. The food placed before me may show me the story of your wars, your famines, your exploration of the seas of the world, your sadness, your joy, your unions,...

It is a far greater thing to truly find where it goes, than to hold on tight to everything you think you have acquired. I feel like it is a broken record of words that we hear on the radio, that we sing in the car, that we wake up and realize. Something so obvious, yet something so obscure.  I saw the sun setting behind me and I stopped trying to steer everything. The world did not stop, it did not fall, and not only that but it flourished and thrived. The sun rose and I watched, and things grew, and in ways that I never experienced exactly. I could see myself in the reflections, and I know that somehow, even when I was doing everything and thinking that I was not paying attention, I was on a deeper level. When I find that this discovery means so much to me, I find that it means so much to them too. Ultimately the mission we are given is to make ourselves obsolete and I guess that is happening. I am overwhelmed with gratitude, pride and love. It has been such a beautiful thing to w...

 So easily, we have fallen into that pattern just like two years ago. That one where it seems to rain in waves of severe downpours every 90 minutes. I find myself preoccupied enough to where in some ways it doesn’t really matter. I know that I’m in denial. At some point it all conflicts with what I want to do.  Decompression of pressure upon me continues. This is creating extensive fragmentation in my thoughts in my direction in my planning. Someone asked me last night, is it because you have been so busy you do not know which end is up? Or is it because you don’t know what to do without all the pressure on you? My answer was, I think it’s actually both of those. For those not engaged in hand to hand combat of that which awaits on the other sides of doors or around corners, down dark alleys, and up around the next bend, I think you really need to think about where you want the next few hours to go. In telling my eighteen year old self’s stories I can see my training of moving ...

 It is a remarkable thing to be stuck in a cycle of preparing to change for years. As those changes at long last come to be, i think I feel surprise and disbelief. Where do you go? What is next? Some of these questions inevitably are answered right away. Others take time. But for now the war is on and the fire is large, and what are you doing? Dreaming about it being over? You are not there yet. So, what happens on December 8, 2228?

  All of my love by Led Zepplin plays in the background as I sit, sipping perfect coffee in front of the campfire after a rainy night. It was 1979. My 14 year old innocence unsuspecting of the daring moves ahead to remove me from my cloud like nativity.     That power that pulls a young person into the complex fourth dimension of existence. It is a detour that one’s older self would tell the younger one to avoid at all costs.   It still rages on. There is a war indeed. Now that I am older, i watch my own sons take the detour. I know it’s power. I know the conviction of the heart of a young man to act as a human shield. Is it a right of passage? Is it a gauntlet that files down the rough edges of our souls? Is is better or is it worse? But it’s all a mystery, when you find you’re still on the road.