The Best Salt

Update & Body Is a Doorway Launch Events

(paper whites thanks to a growing gift from Irena Barouch)

Hunger is the best salt, goes the proverb attributed to Miguel de Cervantes. I’ll second that as someone who lives with a Tantalus-level hunger for food that usually makes me violently ill. Even the plainest, blandest dish tastes like a five-star meal when it is the only thing you have been able to tolerate for days.

But there is an evolution of this proverb I’ve been feeling radiate through my body. The moment directly after a serious encounter with physical pain is the best salt: For food. For life. For gratitude. For everything.

The fever breaks. The joint slips back into place. Your airways dilate. Your heart jumpstarts.

And the next breath tastes like paper-whites waking up under the ice. Like maple syrup. Like sunlight strained through a raincloud into honeyed air.

It reminds me of paradoxically summitting a mountain by accidentally digging downwards and downwards until you break soil on some alpine fontanel by way of tunneling through the center of the very earth.

I am very sick right now. Things that used to be easy are suddenly hard. This is very humbling. And I have tests scheduled for the next two months that may reveal scarier plot twists. But right now, I have tunneled through the center of my personal earth. I am summitting into a different view of the long and short stories interweaving to create my days. I am watching the dawn stain the snow strawberry through my kitchen window, I am filled with a visceral gratitude, one that flutters tachychardic with breathless disbelief in my chest.

I am grateful for the moments of physical breakdown and the sober conferences with my own mortality because they have polished to brightness how very good my life is. I have been healthier before and less happy. I would prefer this dumbstruck awe over any of those anguished, slightly more well-bodied years. Give me this wonder at the beauty of every mundane second of every extraordinary day even in if it comes paired with my faulty organism.

I am so grateful The Body Is a Doorway came into being. That she will be born on March 4^th!

You can pre-order through The Golden Notebook for a signed copy. You can also pre-order the hard copy or the audiobook through any online booksellers here.

Come celebrate in person with me and The Golden Notebook at 2 p.m. on Sunday, March 2^nd at St. Gregory’s in Woodstock NY.

Celebrate online with me on March 4^th in collaboration with Jonathan Gustin. Sign up here.