"ON FOOT"

Travel feeds the soul. Patience Gray, the legendary food writer, followed nature's call to the wild, foreign to her, and built her life around subsistence plants and vines, and peasant agriculture. Her walks to the sea are existential... (While hiking through the refuge this morning, a brilliant friend said that blue light has minerals chromo-active and can be embodied for well-being. And happiness.) The late Anthony Bourdain was this cook's poet-chef, a big fan I am, a follower if only he'd known I carried his passion and taste buds and pen and mind across some of the worlds he's been, feeling I'm him, navigating diverse cultures eating/feasting cuisines and delicacies that go straight to my heart. After visiting a temple in Xiamen, a random local family showed me around their beautiful port city on scooter, and later after a lunch of spicy seafood noodle soup and cold beer, took me to a busy park with their young kids and on tandem bikes, all of us, pedaled through vendors selling sweets and wind flowers in hand and having a great time. One time waiting for my bus in Singapore (to cross over the near border to Malaysia), at the terminal's lunch counter were curry rice bowls with vegetable "parts unknown," fried and smothered, pickled, topped with hard-cooked salted egg, the tastiest dish I'd had all summer long, draining sweat in the heat but feeling all cool! Like Tony. On foot I found a tiny red house restaurant on a sweeping landscape in Eidfjord, Norway offering potato/sorrels/dill/salmon soup with strong bread and brown cheese and had the most peaceful, pristine time under a winter sun. When I wrote a postcard from La Antigua, I printed a fruit photo from my phone and used it as visual to send to my first cousin in Paris. We are kindred in poetry. Whenever, and so frequently when I was still living in New York, I would visit her in France, and at our favorite café in the 11th Arr., we would talk for hours on end, deep talk, art talk, her Walden Pond dream I love the most - and I haven't even touched the salad. Sometimes it's not always food that fills us. There's something greater and cosmic about kinship, about blood friendship, about the bond of love. It definitely feeds the soul.