salt

You are the salt of the earth. I think about this in the context of flavor, but also in the context of my own life. In my experience, there is a natural thing that happens when a person starts communing more closely with love. I’ve had some friends in the dark times of last year, who called out the good in me in spite of the other things that were clouding my vision. I don’t know if Jesus was referring to cooking when he was talking about salt. I’m assuming he was, but I don’t know for sure. Anyways, my experience with salt is that it can be incredibly powerful in bringing out the nuances of a meal.

Ripe avocado blossoms with the addition of a little fresh lime juice and salt. A curry that has been sitting on the edge of greatness takes the tumble into that bath of luminosity with the addition of just a chef’s pinch of salt. Should I keep going? lol

I think there’s something so powerful about this metaphor, because it is talking about complimenting and calling out what is already there in the presence of the person or place or thing that already exists. That is to say that one of it’s purposes is to draw out something that would otherwise be hidden from experiential reality. Salt is an incredible metaphor for what the process of drawing out the beauty in each other can look like.

I think it’s also just as potent to say that when salt has lost it’s flavor the only thing to be done is to send it out onto the road way to be of use facilitating the movement of the hooves of horses and those hot sandals they wore back then. Still, like a big wow moment. You know? Like something so vital and beautiful losing it’s ability to function in the way that it was designed to function. This deep calling to each other and supporting of each other to create experiences and flavors and life that is so full and rich and deep to then lose access to that to the point that the only function for the salt is to be trampled under foot on the road way as a way to preserve the roads. Shit dawg.

My friend Levi thought I’d like Ken Tanner’s instagram account and he was, once again, not wrong about things that I resonate with deeply. Ken had a post yesterday about pain and I thought it was so good. He was talking about how God doesn’t use our pain in the sense of inflicting it on us to meet an end. Instead, God transfigures our pain in a way that only God can, to give us something else. That has absolutely been my experience with God. This cultivation and turning of what would be, from a time bound perspective, throw away things, (like “wasted years” ). This transfiguration that occurs in ways that only he can accomplish. I find him working in more texture and depth and the art piece suddenly becomes more striking and I begin to call out the beauty in others from that place of deep security.

I had a local person tell me last night that racism is dead in Santa Cruz. I was a little rage-y at that moment, I’ll be honest. Instead of cowing though, I went ahead and asked questions and pushed back. I don’t think he liked the part where I said white liberals were helping to reinforce structures of white supremacy, or that the notion of “color blindness” was actually, in my opinion, in the service of these structures. I think what I was surprised by, (as unpleasant and alarming as I found the apparent disconnection of this individual from what I see in America), was that I engaged with this person in a way allowed them to ask me questions on how I would go about “moving the needle” in a positive direction, by the end of the conversation. In earlier times, I would have just unloaded on someone who thought that differently from me, in a very pour gas on the fire sort of bare knuckle boxing way (if I felt I could win) or retreat and say nothing/talk shit later if I didn’t want to risk it.

I think what I realized in this space was that, in spite of how much I dislike the insular white liberal narrative that I’m finding here. The one that I feel is helping keep America in the grip of the elites and allowing for the police unions to keep doing the kinds of atrocities that they are doing. (At one point in the conversation I was like, Kamala Harris is literally a cop). I was surprised to see my own growth in how I handled this sort of proud aloofness founded in ignorance that enraged me. This isn’t like a “pat Joel on the back” sort of moment. I remember, to my chagrin, sitting around a camp fire grilling someone that was happily married to someone and believed in traditional gender roles and believed in being led through life by their husband, because I was a woke feminist. God help me. That was such an embarrassing moment to look back on for me and I want to share that here to kind of put things in perspective.

I’m still learning and I had a measure of compassion for this guy, I was still pissed though. (Also I just wasn’t like going to try to win him over to anything. I just let him know as gently as i could that I did not agree with his lens on reality and as someone who has spent a decent amount of time giving a fuck about social justice related things I wasn’t going to cow before the proud aloofness of the comment.) In the end, approaching the situation with genuine curiosity gave me better results than just setting fire and running or cowing out (fight or flight, ya feel). Being present in the discomfort and engaging anyways was a way of being in the world that was more difficult and ultimately more rewarding for me.