Someone in class today asked about how to write their story when they fear possible rejection by friends and family if they tell the truth. The first thing that popped into my mind was Annie Lamott’s quote, You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. But should haves don’t do much for addressing the fear of being alone in the ocean with your story after the people you wrote about kick you off the island of belonging. The idea that you own everything that happens to you precludes the belief that you own both your stories and your life. When I see little kids with parents who are texting or reading or talking on their phone, I wonder how much of their time together looks like this: distracted adult, unmirrored child. I wonder if the kid is dying of loneliness inside, thinking that this is what life is like, not being seen by the one you love the most. I wonder if the kid feels real. I wonder if the kid feels life has much meaning if a thing is more interesting than they are. Years later, in a college writing class, is that kid going to feel free to write a story about how they used to look at their mom’s or dad’s face, wishing they, the kid, had been shaped more like an iPhone so they could have gotten (could still get) the same kind of deep attention the phone received (receives) for hours and hours every day? If the parent is still wedded to the phone, I’m guessing the college student might hesitate to both show the vulnerability of having needed attention and not gotten it (What was wrong with me, anyway?) and to risk finding out the parent was never all that interested in them in the first place. The disinterest was real. The iPhone was the better kid. The student might also hesitate to write about this painful situation in the fear that somehow their parent or parents would find out and be devastated, crushed, ashamed, broken by the information. What if this information wrecks their parent's life? The Writing 101 assignment goes from an essay about a childhood memory to a lethal weapon. Better to write about something less fraught, less important, less true. Or, better to have parents who have therapists, wise friends, good counsel. Better to trust that your parents and friends are adults and can find these things if necessary. It is not your job to both live your truth and shelter others from the facts of your existance. One way to stay completely safe is to write your story on a dry-erase board with a pen in one hand and an eraser in the other. You can write and wipe simultaneously. It will be like nothing ever happened. It will be like you never were there. I do believe if your friends and family abandon you because you tell your story as feels necessary to you, they were more than likely poisoning the well of your being all along. If someone doesn’t want you to speak freely, what is it they do want? It hurts to lose people. It hurts. But to die having never lived, I am guessing, hurts even more. And the world is so large, populated with human beings aching to resonate with the truth of you. They just don’t know you yet because you were hiding behind the wall if I'm silent, will you stay? To hide is no way to live.

I want to be the kind of person who can make dinner for friends or even just one friend and not feel like I'm going to have an aneurism when faced with the question, “What will I make?” I want to think fish, vegetables, pasta, bread, desserts, whatever. Anything that does not begin with Door Dash. I want to be my own version of Chef’s Table. I want to cook with curiousity and love and fearless hunger. You are living the dream, a new friend said to me the other night over dinner at Byblos, a wonderful restaurant in Norwood, Massachusetts, where what they do with eggplant has brought me to tears twice now, good tears, tears of Oh my god, can I please have a shovel? I wondered what the dream was. Generalized anxiety with bouts of joy? If that’s the dream, I’m living it. In my mind, living the dream is walking home from the Santa Cruz farmer’s market with a basket of produce for which I’d have a plan so the veggies would not rot in the frig drawer as they had a habit of doing when I lived there a few years ago. I am living the dream, I think. I pretty much do what I want, which, since I value freedom above almost everything else, makes life A-OK. For me, however, to be truly living the dream, having my dream and eating it, too, I think I need to learn how to feed myself and others. I need, I believe, to slow down enough to be able to taste my food and really enjoy it. For breakfast I often have a scoop of almond butter because it is easy. For lunch, I’ll eat half a container of lentil soup from Whole Foods because this is fast. Fast means I do not bother with heating the soup up because that would require both a pan and time. I want to go to Camp Slow the Fuck Down and Smell the Coriander, so I enrolled in a spice blending class at Curio Spice Co. (See the first blog post I made on this site if you missed my introduction to this treasure of a shop.) It was amazing and frustrating and brain-changing, and I got WAY more than I paid for. First of all, I don’t know how many spices Susan and Sage put out for us to play with—50? 75? A thousand? There were a LOT of carefully labeled large jars in five different sections: base, middle, top, unify, and flair. There was even saffron. Do you know how much that stuff costs? And there it was, unguarded, for us to use as we desired. Second of all, I forget how much I paid to attend, but it wasn’t a lot. (If it were, I would not have forgotten the amount, and I would have gone in there with the attitude of you owe me.) (For the record, I left with the attitude of I owe you.) Anyway. I’m avoiding talking about the hard thing, which is spice blending. In order to blend spices you have to (according to me) 1. Be in your body. 2. Be curious. 3. Be fearless. I am often none of those things. Susan demonstrated how to create a blend they sell at the store called vadouvan. It was made of turmeric, cumin, fennel, mustard, and fenugreek seeds; freeze-dried shallots, garlic powder, mace, and dried curry leaves. She toasted and ground and the room filled with the scent of something amazing is happening. She was the boss of those spices. They were like people at a dinner party she knew by name and with whom she felt free to mingle and introduce. At Curio, when I was offered pinch of cumin to smell, for example, part of me fisted into a panic. What am I supposed to think about this? What am I supposed to do with this information? What is the right thing to say? This is also sometimes true when I meet a new person. So we are back to the idea that learning to blend spices could very well teach me to be a better person on many levels if I slowed down and smelled the cinnamon. I think blending spices is a little like going on a first date. There’s a lot of information to take in, and one filter could be, Do I like this? Does this please me, and, if so, how? Why? Maybe one reason I got so verklempt over deciding what spices I wanted to blend is because it has now been years since I really kissed someone. (If you think this is a cry for help, it is. Help!) My brain doesn’t think in terms of blending tastes much beyond almonds going with chocolate or espresso going with a muffin--or at least it doesn’t yet. Dear Reader, I dove into the deep end with my spice blend. I started with sage because I miss California and Spirit Hill Farm, and then I went with what sounded interesting: sweet paprika, cumin (I was told cumin does a good job of bridging tastes together, or something along those lines, so I threw it in sort of a health insurance policy), thyme, lemon grass, makrut lime leaf. I knew I shouldn’t have—I could just tell the cocoa nibs did not somehow compliment or play nice with what I had in my jar, but I had to throw some of those dark beauties into the mix, and that is why, I believe, at the end of the day, after I poured the mix out of the grinder and back into my bottle, I called my blend Car Crash on the Farm. I have yet to cook with it. I’m letting it take a prolonged siesta while I figure out what meat or vegetable would be best complimented by such a seasoning. I love blending spices the same way I love landing in Paris and trying to figure out how to get to my hotel. It’s thrilling, sophisticated, and way over my head. It makes me feel alive. It makes me want to learn and change and eat more butter. If you have any ideas for what I could do with Car Crash, I'm open to suggestions. I'm sure going to try something, and I will call in a culinary adventure and feel puffed up with pride and all the bolder for having done it. https://curiospice.com/pages/classes

It only took one time, but I am a floating sound bath hog. It was an experience I think about almost every day, still, months after having done it. It has taken me all those months to write this post because I wanted to keep this place all to myself, but that’s not nice. I’m finally spilling the beans because Wednesday night, April 24, you have the opportunity to experience the full moon floating sound bath run by Kristen Bala at The Deep End, with sound therapist Kathleen Hubbard. The pool is in Kristen’s house. That is a true story. It is also a true story that Kristen is an astrologer and, I suspect, an angel. You’ll know what I mean when you meet her and see the effort she puts into this event. It’s so over the top it’s…it’s…it’s like if you hit the bottom of your Christmas stocking to find a ball of gold jammed into the toe instead of the usual warm orange. Think intentionality. Think well-organized. This support group. Think sound bowls. Think many, many, many sounds bowls. Think yourself into the pool, floating and supported by hammocks or noodles, think yourself in a room with glass walls and what looks like stars all over the ceiling. Think yourself surrounded by Reiki practitioners in the water with you, women who go from person to person, placing a sound bowl on your body, making music of you, helping you fly into your deepest self with the energy of their hands as the woman playing the larger sound bowls turns the entire room into sensation. Even if you, like me, can’t get to Kristen’s house on the full moon and have this experience, what you can do is to remember your body and mind and spirit’s hunger and need to let go and float, to feel supporting hands, even if they are your own, saying, I’ve got you. But if you do get a chance to go, please write to me and tell me every detail so I can float along with you. www.findyourdeepend.com

I fell in love with Curio Spice Co. when I was living at Spirit Hill Farm in Sebastopol, California, and found online, through Curio (which is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts), sea salt from both Martha’s Vineyard and Maine. I got to eat my childhood memories in a place that was thousands of miles away from the Atlantic Ocean. Your memories were of salt, you might ask. Not exactly, Silly, I might answer. I was using poetic license, something that allows me to drive my writing wherever I want to go. The salt reminded me of the Vineyard and its red clay cliffs; it reminded me of the freezing water that used to turn me blue when I was a kid in Kennebunkport. The salt told me: you can have it all. You can live far from your childhood home and still taste it. The salt also told me someone really cares about flavor. Someone really cares about how other people experience the world in their mouth. I mean, getting the ocean into a jar in a form where someone can sprinkle it over their dinner and then finding a store front to sell it is not a simple process. During COVID, I went a little Curio nuts. I bought twenty-five small glass jars and labels and bought Sri Lankan Sweet Cinnamon and Lebanese Sumac and Guatemalan Green Cardamon Pods, and Massachusetts Shiitake Mushroom Powder. I bought many other spices, as well. I liked collecting them, but really I had no idea what to do with them. When I left Spirit Hill for Boston, I put my spice collection into storage, because who needs Sicilian Chile Flakes to write a book about the winningest coach in Ivy League history? I miss those Chile Flakes. I miss all my glass bottles and the labels I’d had so much fun creating, misspelling the words on purpose just to make myself laugh. I wish I had brought them. But guess what? I now live less than 15 miles away from Curio and have been there many times. I went to a cheese tasting event where I got teary over the deliciousness of saffron honey. I went to a book signing event and learned about Italian snack foods and was reminded of how thrilling it is to be alive and to make and share delicious food with others. I went to, last week, a spice blending class where I had no idea what to do with myself. I can order spices and put them in jars so my kitchen looks nice, but use them? Combine them? Oy. I will write more about this in a day or so. What I want to say is that this is my first blog post for my new website. At some point, I will pull the posts from the old site I feel are most important and create a book from them, but for now I am reveling in the opportunity to create myself through writing, yet again. I spent about seven years blogging about what it was like to be adopted, and now I’m going to blog about what it’s like to be curious, hungry, and eager to both find the next wonderful thing and to fully immerse myself in whatever thing I am currently doing. To be here now, but to also have a finger out, testing the winds of the future. I love my new website so much. That’s another story, and I’ll get to it. But for now, enjoy the bunnies. I hope they make you as happy as they make me.