cooking as spiritual practice

Cooking makes love manifest. We tend a garden, head for the grocery store or the farmers’ market,
receive a largesse of food gifts from family, friends, and neighbors. We set to work or perchance to play. Whenever food appears, it is the work of many people and the offering of other forms of life, a gift from Beyond, from sun, earth, sky, and water, from mystery. It is onion knowing how to onion, salmon fully infused with salmoning. It is blood, sweat, and tears; thoughts, emotions, and physical actions made visible, tasteable, edible. What we can put in our mouths, chew, and swallow, digest, absorb, and eliminate has been sorted out from what we can’t. It is offered, served forth. We go on living. Our bodies are nourished, and if we are fortunate, our spirits are lifted.


Lifted, light, and buoyant with the sights, smells, and tastes of what is being eaten, the body remembers that it is also spirit. The divide between body and mind is bridged —no, the two are simply no longer recognized or found. They have become indistinguishable from the present, magnificently vibrant and awash with well-being. Whether spoken or not, thank you choruses throughout the room: to Source, to God, to the Divine, to family and friends, to the chefs, the growers, the pickers and shippers, to our ancestors, to the Blessed Ones and to those nor so blessed, to all beings giving their lives. We give thanks. We are grateful. We forget ourselves. We forgive ourselves, and others. We praise.


It’s in the cooking. It’s in the eating, in the air, the ground, the sunlight. You can tune to it. You can bring it forth.


It’s your good heart expressing itself, manifesting wherever you look. Loving what is. And using your body, mind, and heart to bring it to the table, ready to eat.


— edward espe brown, no recipe: cooking as spiritual practice

fire, delicate fire, in the flesh. blind, stunned, the sound of thunder, in my ears

i love the sensual.

for me this

and love for the sun

has a share in brilliance and beauty

— sappho, excerpt of he’s equal with the gods 
& fragment 9

baby girl 2005

15 years old 

my diet

pizza, wine & sun

DOLCE & GABBANA MAGIC

when we met carl barat from the libertines

had some fun with 50 % of the libertines this weekend haha

“i want to understand you, I study your obscure language” — alexander pushkin

“here, on a very warm nightwith a honeysuckle, jasmine breeze
heady, rich and almost liquid
you can stand on the sun-filled stones
stretch and hold
the heart-breaking sweetness
of the night.”


— maggie emmett

do it from the heart or not at all - cc

really liked this passage from carlos castanedas - the teaching of don juan that i read the other day and i wanted to share it with you


“Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary.

This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.


Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path. A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.”

charm me. furiously. torment me. in detail. — hermann hesse

The night outside was like a dark, heavy, perfumed flower. An expectant night- a night when things intended to happen. Very still. Only the loveliest of muted sounds- the faintest whisper of trees, the airiest sigh of wind, the half-heard, half-felt moan of the sea.
— L.M. Montgomery, Emily’s Quest

family +pesto

all of today's obligations are completed so now i can just enjoy the afternoon at my sister's place with a plate of her famous pesto, need nothing else ♡

"i want to be inside your darkest everything"

frida forever

erykah badu

 i'm so so exhausted today fso I'm staying in tonight with badu as my only company

to burn like the lost — eduardo c.corral

DREAMERS

closing the week with one of my favorite films by bernardo bertulucci

louis garrel♡

constant milk

body of skin, of moss, of ardent and constant milk
— pablo neruda

sweet dates, honey, pomegranate, almonds & camus

“A liquid morning rose, dazzling, over the pure sea. From the sky, fresh as a rose, washed and rewashed by the waters, reduced by each successive laundering to its most delicate and clearest texture, a quivering light fell, endowing each house, each tree, with a palpable shape and a magic newness. The earth must have risen in just such a light the morning the world was born.”
– Albert Camus, from Lyrical and Critical Essays

kourosh yaghmaei

70's music from Iran, gives me the chills

“sólo tu corazón caliente, y nada más” - federico garcía lorca, deseo

☾

walpurgis night was celebrated with friends, food and a lot of vodka, oops. I'm so hungover today I can barely spell my own name, so let's just leave it there

hungarian gulasch

this weekend was all about cooking dani's grandfathers famous hungarian gulasch that tasted like memories and spicy paprika, kissing & hugging my prince alexis, playing board games while looking bored to death, hot black coffee, family, reading nabokov in bed and a friends birthday party

— "aranyhíd"

(noun) An untranslatable hungarian word, aranyhíd is defined as the glistening reflection of the sun on the ocean.

the prophet

"Let there be spaces in your togetherness, And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls. Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup. Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf. Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone, Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music. Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping. For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts. And stand together, yet not too near together: For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow"

 — Khalil Gibran

let it find you

“My father says that Persians believe in silent communications; a look or gesture imparts far more than a book full of words.”
— Mahbod Seraji, Rooftops of Tehran