I've been writing this food blog more than ten years now beginning in Bushwick, Brooklyn, I was fresh off grad school at that time and was hungry both viscerally and culinarily after several years abroad for a teaching scholarship (S. Korea and the Philippines), and I was ready to come home to the U.S. and cook my heart out in my kitchen and knew just outside my door I had access to a vibrant community of victuals purveyors, menu tastemakers and pop-up hipster chefs. Welcome to the Big Apple. Ezra Pound wrote that the essence of a poet is that he builds us his world. And New York City had all the tools, if I may add. If the decade had produced anything for me - intersecting food with poetry - and significantly if the world I had traveled through creating my writings was sphere, then like the angel in Dante's Divine Comedy I have every segmented slice colored the wheel with flavor and beauty, and poignancy. Reading is infused in my writing. I can not achieve in this world without books. Also the memories from gathering and observing my food for gathering to share. The health of my heart I give to cooking; and by that I mean the holistic approach to this world I'm building - poetry on top of poetry, like layers of mille-feuille. But it isn't just all sweet and cream denotatives. I really wanted to reflect also on the struggles of isolation and dreams deferred in these uncertain times. I do not know, for example, the future of the Carlton, Ore. farm (photo inset), if the basis of its sustainability is separate lives. And growing older is also a case of slowing down. But I heal with the food I eat on Maui. Moringa pods ginger soup with a splash of cashew milk I share with my surfer roommate sucking out the marrow of life (to invoke Thoreau). Once a coworker had told me I will live forever eating moringa leaves. I told her the realistic measure of my life is in terms of the world of writing I will leave behind. A childhood friend on mainland has been my remote nurse lately, making sure I took care of myself in these uncertain times. I have to harness everything in my creative power to complete that world. In this blog I am not reflecting on mortality. At Iao wilderness when I hike the fallen mangoes have a taste-quality of their own. When I press the pink pulp-seeds of the guava on my tongue and wash it down with spring water from the waterfalls grotto, this life I live now out of New York and into the wild of Maui is like a brethren to my consciousness nature fills. I learned today a Brazilian-Portuguese word saudade (pronounced SAO-dodge), and it means a celebratory missing of someone who's no longer around, not a feeling-word to be down about, but more to positively and passionately affirm your mark in them. Saudade! A toast to the past and the now, to the good times and bad, to the heart you have worn on our sleeve that had always got your back, and "to sail through, to seek beyond the sunset, and never yield.." (Lord Alfred Tennyson) for the world you had promised us to see.
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