Grief

 

August 30, 2021

 

Greetings from the keening,

 It wasn’t until the next morning that I realized we didn’t get a picture of the brothers and sisters together.  That was coupled with an almost automatic thought that saw us lining up in Leslie’s yard, squinting into the sun, smiling together for whoever would take the picture.  And then a fraction later the sharp pain that reminded me that Leslie wouldn’t be in that photo.

 Grief is personal, comes custom fitted to each of us.  Sometimes it is molded so close we don’t recognize it, and then we are reminded what that dull ache is.  Perhaps a single word we don’t use any more, or the instinct to call, or a reminder of something we meant to say.

 Or the impulse, grown by decades of love and life, suddenly rendered futile. 

  More than a hundred people crowded into her home, filled the yard and spilled into the street, laughing and talking, and hugging each other.  And crying.  Each came with their own stories of Leslie, their histories wound together with others there.  Each came with their own version of their love of her, and of their own grief.

 On the tables scattered around the yard and in the house there were dozens of pictures of Leslie, smiling at us, nested with friends, surrounded by her children, holding Bill.  A montage of memories flowed in photographs from nearly every corner. 

 I spoke with most everyone at the party, many of whom have something in common with me in that we won’t remember each other’s names.  But we remember Leslie’s name, we have that in common too.  It was a delight to be in that sea of people, all pressed into the same space to share stories about someone we love.

 It was a beautiful celebration, with music and laughter and food and wine and memories.  It was a reunion for some, a chance to be together when we most needed to be.  Of course, in each of the friends and family there was their version of grief.  For some it was in a quiet corner with Leslie’s dog Patience or holding onto a dear friend in the kitchen and crying.  For some the ache was overwhelming, etched on their faces. 

 Her friend Bruni waved me closer, in awe of all of the people gathered to celebrate my sister.  She said: “I see Leslie in all of them.”

 I know what she meant.  We all have her in common, all touched by her passions and the genuine joy she took in living with us while she was here.  And for this season, we are also bound together by her loss, by our own version of grief.

I wasn’t watching for it, but it was there for most everyone I met.  Broken hearts, leaking eyes, tender words, soft looks.  There was compassion, comfort, there was lonely, singular pain.  Each of us wore our grief as it was made for us.

 If I’m honest I wouldn’t choose this sorrow, and I wish I could save others from it.  I know it’s part of us living here, and loving each other, but each layer of sadness that is added makes me wonder.

 Thankfully there is healing and hope.  Not that we ever live with the complete absence of pain, of this feeling of lack, of loss.  I know better than to ask for that, because grief is one of the ways we will keep my sister with us.  None of us knows the number of days we will get from here; all we can do is live them fully and sense her in them.

 Some days that will mean feeling grief.  Ann Lamott said: “It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”

 For a little while this morning I looked through pictures of my family.  Not every picture includes everyone we care about.  Not every picture has Leslie in it.  But Bruni was right; I see Leslie in all of them.

 We are going to go on making new memories and weave them in with those we already created.  We won’t stop living, or taking pictures, and we won’t ever stop loving Leslie.  We won’t ever stop seeing her in all of us. 

 Hope this finds you feeling the joy and ache,

 David

 

 

 

Copyright © 2021 David Smith

Superstars of the 70's

 

 

August 23, 2021

 

Greetings from the response,

 There is an interesting connection, a fit, the way things live together in our minds.  I don’t have any say about this connection, it existed before I could name these kinds of things.  Thoughts, emotions, images, experiences, all nested together in some mysterious magic in our minds.

 When I hear the song ‘Tumblin’ Dice’ by the Stones, I naturally expect that next Otis Redding will sing ‘The Dock of the Bay’.  James Taylor will finish ‘Fire and Rain’ and, of course, The Dead will start ‘Truckin’.   This is now a part of me, as natural as breathing.

 In the house where I grew up, there was the ‘breakfast room’, a space just off the kitchen, lined with windows looking out into a miniscule back yard.  In one corner was nested the small built-in desk that held the sewing machine where my mother made clothes to humiliate us in school.  Diagonal from that was where the hi-fi was kept. 

 A few of you would recognize this monstrosity; it was a turntable with a built in am/fm radio, all of it housed in a piece of furniture large enough to rival a decent sized coffin. We kids, those who had the means to buy records, were not encouraged to use the hi-fi.  Perhaps the word ‘forbidden’ was used.  Semantics.

 I was a teenager in the 70’s, and somehow in the early part of that tumultuous decade I became the owner of Warner Brothers’ four album set called ‘Superstars of the 70’s’. 

 Those four discs played on that record player a lot, along with a few 45’s of my sisters, and the rest of our modest collection of vinyl.  Forty-eight songs, locked in place on each of the discs, played hundreds of times, only in the order that Warner Brothers deemed.  So, even today, when I hear ‘One Way Out’ by the Allman Brothers, there is a little vibration of expectation in my brain that says, “Aretha is now going to sing ‘Natural Woman’.”

 These notes and lyrics are wound together in ways that Pavlov may have had some understanding, but the connections are more than just conditioning.  Each of those songs, while not all my favorite, made space in mind with its neighbor, and with other images and memories and with the emotions that bind them together.

 The hi-fi was eventually moved to a location closer to the living room, and to its rightful status in life.  There the romping Highland Fling and other favorite Scottish bagpipe music could be played with more appropriate decorum than the breakfast room. 

 In its place in the corner of the breakfast room was our first record player, placed regally on a folding TV tray, and scattered around that the albums and singles we accumulated.  Somehow, my four siblings and I shared that space and the turntable and managed to listen to music, probably while we were supposed to be doing something else.

 The mix of images and the feelings that come with them are complicated and beautiful.  I see my family as they were, younger and less worldly, each of us, including our parents, trying to figure out how to make our lives what they could be.  It’s more than the breakfast room or the music, or the sewing machine or standing in front of the oven to get warm in the morning.  It’s all of that, and with it, this thing that winds between it all.

 I had a live album from Carlos Santana and Buddy Miles, recorded in 1972.  I played it loud and often, as it was meant to be.  My younger sister Leslie, whose musical taste was perhaps tilted in other ways, for some reason showed an interest.  I played the cut ‘Free Form Funkafide Filth’, a twenty-five-minute-long jam session.  I remember her sitting with me listening, and we talked about how the musicians wove in and out, took the lead, stepped back, how the song had different segments and themes.  I have no expertise in music, it was just a conversation between a brother and sister, one that didn’t include bickering or teasing.

 Years later, when both of us had children and other collections of music and living that eclipsed those earlier days, we were in her kitchen talking about something else and she said: “I remember sitting in the breakfast room, and you taught me how to listen to music.”  Giving me way too much credit in that sentence, she held the image and emotion of us there with Carlos Santana, all spun together with a bond that somehow survived decades.

 My choice of music has evolved since then, somewhat.  But nothing will dilute the feeling I have when I hear a song from the ‘Superstars’ albums and feel the expectation of the next one in the lineup.  Stephen Stills cannot sing ‘Love the One You’re With’ unless right after Yes plays ‘Roundabout’.

 This vignette demonstrates the beautiful construct of us.  It shows how we become who we are, and how the memories, a blend of emotions and images and all our senses, contribute to how we react to life.  There is something that is woven between all these which seems to be our essence, the most fundamental part of our existence.  It is more than synapses and psychology.

 This morning as I wrote I have been playing ‘Free Form Funkafide Filth’, which holds many memories of beaches and parties and dancing and fun, but chief among those, the first thought as the music began, was the image of my sister Leslie sitting with me in the breakfast room.  That song cannot play unless we are in it.

 

Hope this finds you forever expecting what’s next,

 

David

 

 Copyright © 2021 David Smith

Tree

 

 

 

August 16, 2021

 

Greetings from the sap,

 It’s a thankless job, being a tree.  As I write this, just outside my window, there is a row of giant white pines that have stood there all their lives, decades, and not once have I considered thanking them.  Well.

 Their neighbors, the maples and oaks, edge the yard, form the forest that is the home to deer and rabbits and fox and countless other things that love it there.  These trees do their work without notice, not expecting to share in some communal glory.  They don’t pout for the lack of attention, at least from us. 

 They raise up, hold the myriad stars in the sky, or the dense blue plate, easing the sun from one branch to the next as the world asks for the day.  They shoulder the snow, they give shelter to families of birds, collect sun, absorb what we breathe out and scrub it clean, make hiding places for small animals.   They frame the horizons so that the color of our beginnings and endings have contrast and texture.

 They dance in the wind, the edge of graceful, a ballet perhaps for themselves, but still a performance for us.  They softly clap their leaves together in delight, partnering with the wind, usually, to create music, to add as much movement as a tree is allowed in life. 

 These trees, and the ones you know, create shade, mute the harsh sounds that would jar us.  Out on my deck, I can sit in a chair with a cup of coffee, listen to the rain sigh on the maple tree that keeps the damp at bay, my living canopy.  Mrs. Leafly gives me this gift with no expectations. 

 These living things that do this and much more we can’t see, who ask little of us, and do not seek our gratitude, these noble things that make possibilities for all of creation.  Saplings in Maine, Redwoods in California, all bound by a heritage older than human existence.

 I try to avoid conversations that feature the weather.  It usually feels like what people will talk about when they are too timid to talk about other things, or perhaps too tired to conjure the imagination to find something more interesting.  So if someone told me a storm was coming, I missed it. 

 This was a violent storm, vindictive and angry.  Smarter people described a ‘microburst’, which is a terrible misnomer, since there was nothing small about it to us.  A terrible surge of energy punished the world here, and its chief victims were trees.

 Some were snapped, some ripped up from their roots and thrown to the earth.  Giant trees, older than me, shredded into something else, broken, split, splintered, ended.  I ran through the park, looking at their carcasses, the bits of noble things now humble detritus.  I wondered if they feel, if other trees mourn their loss, in some tree way.

 There was the angry noise of chainsaws, reducing the trees into something smaller yet, making room for us to live where we want to, to go where we want to.  It was a terrible dirge to mark the passing of these beautiful things.  Maybe because of other thoughts that filled my mind, I found myself mourning the trees.  And then the moment was redeemed.

 The author David James Duncan wrote about trees, a simple but brilliant paragraph I’m afraid you won’t find, so I’ll share some of it here.    “…we marveled that the bodies of trees are built by their downward hunger for earth and water and their upward yearning for light.” A paradox that might destroy other things causes the tree to grow strong.  And this:

 “..during the tree’s afterlife, its former hunger and yearning transmogrifies into the enduring structural integrity known as wood.  Wood is a tree’s life history become something so solid that we can hold it in our hands. This is not just some lonely cry or mournful eulogy.  Right here in the world where every living thing dies, a fallen tree’s integrity remains so literal that if a luthier adds string to it we can turn the departed tree’s sun-yearning and thirst-quenching into the sounds we call live music.  And if a seeming lunatic smashes the wood’s integrity to a pulp, then makes that pulp into paper, our ink can bring to life stories that multitudes can perform like symphonies in the sanctums of their very own depths and heights.” 

 I am a woodworker, a modest example but nonetheless it is something I have a passion for.  I realize more why.  I love the aroma of saw dust, of freshly cut wood.  I like the feel of wood being planed or sanded, the shape and texture.  I like the bit of moisture there in the flesh of the grain, that proof of its living history.  I love trees, I love the product of their life.

 A few feet from here is a table I made from maple trees.  Their life, already full and beautiful, extended into mine, into my family’s lives, and now our history is intertwined.  The table is scuffed and scratched from countless meals and homework sessions and card games and birthday celebrations.  The tree’s literal integrity, born of wind and sun and earth and rain, did not end when the tree fell.  It simply began again, with me, in this new life.

 I am a writer, a modest example but nonetheless it is something I have a passion for.  In the tradition of writers, my work will be printed on paper, the grandchildren of a tree whose days of sighing in the wind are finished.  But whose legacy is continued, in partnership with the words that form my own. 

 In my small way, I have found a way to thank trees for their gifts to us and all the living things they hold in their boughs.  It is a strange sentence to write, but I feel a sense of debt to these parts of creation, and it delights me to think that somehow my life now acts as gratitude for their beauty. 

 Even so, when I finish writing this sentence, I am going out to see the guardian pines and thank them for all they bring to my life. 

 

Hope this finds you grateful,

 

David

 

 

 

Copyright © 2021 David Smith

Leslie

 

 

August 9, 2021

 

Greetings from a brother,

 “Who would want to live a life where you didn’t love someone so much that you didn’t grieve their loss?”  Tom Skaff. 

 The world spins, and it spins among other planets, and they all spin in orbits and the galaxies spin in sensual whorls, and the universe curves in wider swaths into whatever is beyond.  And in all of that, my sister Leslie slowly moved to the edge of the inexorable motion and held for an eternal moment, and then she let go.  And the momentum of her life sent her into some new place.

 On Thursday, Leslie quietly let out her last breath, and with it, became something new.   She has not ended, she has changed.  And we, complicated and simple things left behind, changed with her.

 It takes a unique courage to know what will end your life.  Most of us will never face that knowledge.  We will only be vaguely aware, perhaps, that one day we will walk through a door to something else.  Maybe it will be some sudden thing no one could anticipate, or any combination of human experiences that may lead to a slow slide to a quiet end. 

 My sister Leslie knew with a certainty what would cause her last breath, and she watched it unfold in front of her.  She approached that uncompromising promise with grace and dignity and a beauty that held even to the last day.  Even writing these words, now blurred in the prism of tears, I am in awe of her strength.

 Some months ago, I was talking with Leslie on the phone and for reasons I didn’t know I read to her from a book I have called ‘One Long River of Song’.  Brian Doyle wrote of a nun he met once who said: “No one beats cancer, cancer is a dance partner you don’t want and don’t like, but you have to dance, and either you die, or the cancer fades back into the darkness at the other end of the ballroom.”

 Even as I shared the words, I felt terrible, as if I were telling her some other bad news she didn’t already know.  But she did.  Cancer is rarely beaten; it is to be endured.  It has no purpose other than to destroy, and yet humans, my sister prime among those, turn that purpose into something filled with hope and patience and perhaps the best of what we are created for.

 Not many weeks ago, I sat in the shade of bamboo trees and held my sister’s hands and we talked and listened, and in that spinning together of us, and of her soul’s mate, Bill, we suspended time.  We set aside the incessant change, the incorruptible procession of us, and just learned what humans always want to know.  That we matter, that we are loved, that we will be remembered.  That if life goes on without us, it’s not without us.

 We invited God to join us and He was present, but remained quiet, and didn’t take questions.  I think we were given the space to ask and answer and wonder and be afraid and seek possible, and that’s what He wants us to ache for.   

 Some day if you ask me, I will tell you about that afternoon, an impossible stretch of time, given Leslie’s condition.  I have a rich life, and a history of experience that is filled with variety and adventure and remarkable moments.  But, my friend, that piece of living we had in those few hours, is matched by rare few companions.

 Among the things we talked about were the mysteries of life, including the ultimate mystery; what happens when the struggle ends and we greet the cloud of witnesses, when we take whatever steps we are given to reach forever and after.   There are so many beliefs, so many philosophies, so many stories about what to expect, each as meaningful as the next, as meaningful as what the Avett Brothers said:

‘Will I join with the ocean blue?
Or run into a savior true?
And shake hands laughing
And walk through the night, straight to the light
Holding the love I've known in my life
And no hard feelings’

 My faith tells me that what waits for us beyond the door of our life is more wondrous than Leslie or I could imagine.  That makes me smile, because Leslie knows now, and because my sister wouldn’t need ‘wondrous’.  She only wants to see those she loves who wait there.  She hopes for a place where she can sit with God in the warm shade of bamboo and feel the ease of a conversation with someone who loves her.  She only wants to see our lives here unfold, and that we are all right even as we miss her.

 There is no escaping grief, and still I want to ease the pain for those who can’t bear it.  Someone told me a long time ago, I wish I could say who it was, that when someone leaves us, they also create ways to stay with us: “Look for signs of them.”  Meaning, small ways to know they are there, watching our lives, part of us in a new way.  There, in the smile of her sister, there in the love of her husband, there in the mannerisms her children took from her.  Perhaps in the clacking of bamboo in the wind, or the sigh of wind chimes.  Perhaps in the sunflowers that stood for her brave dance with an unwanted partner.

 I am told that we have in our bloodstreams the dust from stars which last shone a bazillion years ago.  That matter never ends, it only changes, and by extension, changed us.  We would not be exactly what we are had these supernovas not shone so brilliantly.

 This truth fits perfectly with my sister Leslie’s life.  In the sliver of time she was here she changed everyone with her light.  Each of us, her husband, her children, her brothers and sisters, her nearly infinite choir of friends, now share Leslie in our bloodstream.  It is such a privilege to carry her with us, to show her our lives in the days given to us here.  It is a joy to feel her in this way that cannot ever, ever end.  And if we want to look for signs of her, we need only look for the glimmer in the eyes of those who love her, that vast galaxy of other stars shining with her brilliance.

 

 Hope this finds you looking for Leslie,

 

David

 

 

 

Copyright © 2021 David Smith

Undiscovered

 

August 2, 2021

 

Greetings from the expedition,

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”  T.S. Eliot

 In the time humans have roamed the world, it has only been the last several hundred years where we intentionally explored just for the sake of discovery.  In the millennia before that we just wandered around, picking up food.

 But we have been an ambitious lot: it is hard to find a place on earth where people have not already been before you.  I have a decent history of wandering around, and exploring intentionally, and is unlikely in my wide travels that I have ever been in a place first.  I doubt I have ever stood in a place never seen by people before.

 So, it was a little thrill to have that experience this week.

 Humans are just touching the deepest spaces of the ocean, for some the last frontier on the planet.  There are few jungles we have not mapped.  We have already planted flags on the tips of the highest mountains, spelunked into vast caves, fought our way into the frigid reaches of the two poles.  And when the limits to search slowly ran out, we sought beyond the bounds of gravity.

 Several weeks ago, I was sitting on my brother’s deck in southern California, chatting in the dim light just after sunset.  In mid-sentence Douglas pointed into the sky and we stood in awe and watched a string of sixty satellites make their way into the east.  It was an impressive site, low orbit commuters starting their first day’s journey around the planet.  This was just one glimmer of the already crowded search of the next unexplored places.

 When I see others finding the edge of what is known it fills me with an excitement and a curiosity, and a little envy.  I am not a thrill seeker, not addicted to adrenaline or the need for whatever the next new horizon holds.  But I feel the same call they feel. 

 I have felt it on a path in the woods, or my hands on a giant boulder, made before all of us, or coming into a clearing to find a lake.  I have also felt it calling to me as I run down an empty ribbon of road heading over the horizon that holds something else.  So, I recognized it this week, when I had a glimpse of the uncharted, untouched, unknown place in front of me.

 I ran a few miles from where my family stayed, went up a path to the water’s edge, a secluded stretch of beach.  Not pristine; my footprints were not the first.  It was just far enough away from the busy world for me to settle down and see.  I crouched at the water’s edge with no plan, and waited.

 I watched the small waves give out in the shallows and ebb toward me, and then lap at the firm sand.  I saw the water surround the small stones that had settled there, a wet caress, and then retreat to pass the next wave taking its place.  The water glistened, polished each pebble, played among the paths in the sand, then slipped away, taking time with it.  This had gone on for all of the world’s forgotten history, and now I was in it too.

 Hidden in that moment I felt the undiscovered, the new, the never seen.  I had a glimpse of eternity, of a new world, the thrill of seeing the birth of a star or the edge of an unclimbed peak.

 I didn’t think of what time had passed, just held on to what I witnessed, held by explorer’s awe.  Later, as I ran back up the trail, I remembered what Heraclitus said: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” 

 It may be in the edge of a candle’s flame, or in the glimmer in your granddaughter’s eye, or in the first light of a burgeoning day, or the feel of earth on your hands as you press the plant into the cool soil.  These are unexplored places, as unique as each of us, woven in a moment that has never been experienced, and won’t be repeated.

 It is there in the magic you trade with another person, the first time you learn of them, or you tell them about you, maybe surprising yourself.  It is in the roots of friendship and love that become wound together.  It is amazing and breathtaking, and no one but you has seen it before.

The beauty in this, you already see, is that this adventure is in every day.  And, in its wake we get to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

 

Hope this finds you seeking,

 

David

 

 

 

Copyright © 2021 David Smith

Film

 July 26, 2021

 

Greetings from a different focus,

 I stood in line behind my friend Dan, edging our way through airport security, barely listening to the TSA agent’s drone about shoes and belts and liquids. 

 “I have to have them deal with these separately,” he said, a little apologetically.  He held up a baggie of little plastic containers, which, at first, I couldn’t identify.  Then it registered, as if the image was sent from a different dimension via air mail post.

Rolls of film. 

 Photos are time machines.  For most of my life, looking at pictures was a way to step back into a different era for a minute and enjoy whatever took place there.  I have photo albums still, nested among books and other portals.  I love visiting these other times, in the words and in the photos I’ve saved.

 This along with a trove of digital pictures, stored on computers and thumb drives and of course, my phone.  The advent of digital photography, and the ubiquitous lens in the palm of our hand, has changed how we care about photographs, I think.

 Dan anticipated my question about the film, explaining how he got decided to try a camera someone was giving away, and found it satisfying.  The mechanics of operating it, figuring out how to focus, what light does to the image he wants to capture.  He laughed a little at the cost, and of course waiting for the film to be developed to see if the picture you thought you took was in fact what you got.

 There is a generation of people now taking pictures who will never understand the analog experience.  I’m not certain it matters, in the grand scheme, but the idea of losing this other way of capturing moments on film, these little prisms of another time, gave me pause.

 Loading a camera, spooling the film into place, lining up the teeth of the feed with little holes in the roll, paranoid about touching the celluloid or letting light get on it, which just added to the mystery of how it all worked.  And the focusing and adjusting and clicking and advancing.  It was a process, even as the point and shoot cameras were invented.  

 And then waiting a week for the images to be created, so you can see what you captured, and be transported back to that moment.  Opening that envelope from the photo processor, complete with the negatives so you could order more prints, and then sorting through the ‘bad’ pictures; the cropped off heads and overexposed shots, and this one of someone’s knee.

Of course, there was improvements in the process.  The cameras soon did most of the work, and the processing got to be ‘Next Day’.  You drove up to a little kiosk in the parking lot of a grocery store and dropped your roll of film off to some surly teenager, and magically there were photos in a paper envelope the following day.  Unless you wanted slides for your projector, that could take a little longer.  And then you could get ‘doubles’ so you could share the prints with your friends.

 And there was an era of Polaroid film, that was nearly instant.  Take a picture and the camera spat the print out as it developed in front of your eyes.  How many of us fanned the Polaroid square, waiting to see if we got ‘devil’s eyes’ again? 

 I only vaguely understand the chemistry and mechanics of taking analog pictures, just enough to leave the process in the realm of magic.  For nearly 200 years there has been this slow progression from daguerreotype, and huddling under a cloak, holding an explosive flash in one hand, to the Kodak disposable cameras, and nearly suddenly, digital.  That progress has made our miraculous time travel possible, and then easier, and now nearly thoughtlessly convenient.

 There is a semantic difference I’ve noticed when people talk about photography.  Some say, ‘I want to take your picture.’  Others ‘I want to make your picture.’  It’s a small thing, but it has held my attention.  ‘I want to make your picture’ sounds like the photographer is engaged with the process and the subject in a more intimate way.  I mention this because that’s what I think begins to dissolve when we leave the analog experience behind.

 Dan is a thoughtful, gentle person, with a generous sense of humor.  He loves fly fishing, another sort of romantic vestige of another era.  As he told me about his experiences with a film camera, I sensed the care he employed, the attention he gave.  In those moments it felt like the photos that Dan had captured on real film were more precious.  I have to say, I had forgotten the respect I had once held for making pictures.

 I like the convenience of digital photography, and the ease of having a camera in my hand whenever I want.  And I also see the value, the importance, of capturing important moments, purposefully, carefully.  Of making pictures, these slivers of life, saved for us to travel back to whenever we miss the people and the places we saw in those moments.

I realize the nostalgia laced in here, but this conversation with Dan made me think about the next photo I took with my phone.  I considered it differently, gave it just a little of the reverence a miracle deserves. 

  

Hope this finds you with correct exposure,

 

David

 

 

 

Copyright © 2021 David Smith

Hunger

 

July 19, 2021

 Greetings from the insatiable,

 I rarely wake up simply because I am done sleeping.  Usually there is something that prompts me, often some stray thought that has marinated during the night, finally ready for me to pay full attention to.  Sometimes it is mourning doves, or my pillow is too hot. This week I noticed that I woke up because I was hungry.

 I don’t go to bed hungry, so I’m not sure what happens during the night that creates this appetite.  Perhaps I am a lot more active in my dreams than I know.  That aside, yesterday I woke just before five, and idled in semi-sleep a while looking out the window, and felt hunger.  And it was excellent.

 I enjoy being hungry.  I don’t mean I torture myself with it, or intentionally fast to feel it.  I am simply noticing the natural ache that my body creates that signals this need.

 With some exceptions, I eat to fuel my body’s work.  I am not analyzing calories and content closely as I should, but I am aware of the needs of the machine, and I tend to that.  It is one of life’s perfect delights; to create the need for food and then experience the pleasure of satisfying an appetite.

 I’ve come to think of hunger as a companion of sorts.  I like feeling its presence, in the same way I relish the ache of muscles I have worked.  To me, hunger is not the absence of something, but the presence of something.

 I enjoy eating.  I have some favorite foods, and I love being with people I care about to share a meal.  I’ll admit some food I simply shovel in until I get tired and hope it’s the right amount.  But most things I eat I enjoy, because of the flavors, but also because of the partnership it plays with hunger.

 I have been lucky to have sampled all kinds of food from all over the world.  But I am satisfied with the simplest fare because I feel this connection between my body and the food it asks for.  Some of the strongest images I have is from when I travelled around the country on my bicycle, often patching together unusual meals, trying to keep up with the outrageous calories I burned each day.  Peanut butter and honey sandwiches, oatmeal, Grape Nuts, an occasional egg.

 I remember stirring instant macaroni and cheese on my little grasshopper stove, scraping in a can of tuna to add some flavor and protein.  It was not gourmet, but it was still some of the best eating I can recall.  It was one of those intimate moments where I felt this visceral connection between the uncomplicated food and the sharp hunger that seared me.

Hunger is a reminder of our life, of being alive.  It has shades and intensities, it can affect our attitude, our choices, how we spend time.  But without digging into any of that, I simply feel it for what it is: a signal as primal as breathing, one that I have in common with every human that has ever existed.  Even at its strongest, I love how it feels in me.

 I recognize that as I send these words out there are still people who are not getting all the food they need each day. They are truly hungry, and they don’t have the choice to change it.  I mean no disrespect to them, or to any of the people who seek to solve that nearly impossible challenge.

 I’m also very aware of people in my life, now and in the past, who have lost their appetite.  Such easy words to write, and yet for people who are ill, or just worn down, and can’t enjoy this simple act, it is a tragic collection of letters.  For them food is a burden, even as they know they need it to nourish them. 

 I know others who have lost their interest in other appetites in their life.  I’ve had my own chapters of this, so I can sense it when I meet someone who has lost their desire for beauty or friendship or love or adventure.  Even as I write this, I am aware of how I have dulled my own pangs, and I am learning better.

 I’m grateful to feel hunger, to know my body is acting as it should.  I enjoy that edge, that ache, that tells me that I am still alive, that I am running the machine the way it was intended.  I also realize that I am privileged to be in a place where whatever I choose to satisfy my hunger is as close as my next thought.

 It's so easy to take any of this for granted.  So, I said to the man in the mirror: Slow down enough to feel the hunger, to choose to ease it intentionally, enjoy the food and be grateful for the magic.

 

Hope this finds you asking for seconds,

 

David

 

 

 

Copyright © 2021 David Smith