Small sweet joys

Strawberries, always

A friend gave me a jar of crushed strawberry vinegar, found on the sale rack at the back of a supermarket. I love that people in my life know I am always in the market for an unusual vinegar.

At the moment I am infusing a cup of it with cloves in a glass jar on the kitchen table, and missing Michael.

When I am missing, what am I missing

Michael is my wise and funny chef friend who died this past year, my co-conspirator in all taste-related joy-experiments.

I want to tell him about the cloves, ask him what he thinks, if it’s too much intensity. I think he would do coriander instead.

But also he knows about how I am a Flavor Maximalist, so he would support my choice. He’d be excited to know how it turns out either way, I can tell you that.

Hanging out

The clove-infused strawberry vinegar is for a peach shrub. The peaches are macerating with sugar and smoked cinnamon in the refrigerator, they have been there since Thursday.

I think I’m going to pull out my mom’s immersion blender and give them some help. With the immersing. I am missing her too.

And then I am going to add the vinegar infusion, and give it all a few more days to hang out.

I want to ask Michael about this too, what he thinks about infusing the vinegar separately. So the vinegar is hanging out with herbs while the fruit hangs out with the sugars, and then they meet up.

Infusion

I want to ask Michael about infusions. He always had dozens of ferments going, jars upon jars, so many gorgeous vibrant experiments.

Michael: a joy-infusion of a human being.

How am I going to keep infusing things with pleasure and meaning, how am I ever going to know enough about this work of melding? I guess I just have to keep going and find out.

I know from decades of movement practices (yoga, feldenkrais, dance etc) that you can infuse a moment.

You can infuse a moment

You use intention, attention, and breath.

Maybe a little magic, I don’t know how to explain it better than that. But it can be done.

The thing about not knowing / the grief of what is missing

There is a lovely certainty I can access when I am trying to feel into the qualities involved in missing my friend.

That is to say, I know without a doubt that Michael would be enthusiastic about my questions, happy for me, excited for my experiment, curious, imagining all the flavor combinations, his beautiful brain generating further experiments. These are the knowns.

And then there are all the unknowns. The coriander, for example. The ideas and suggestions he would have that I am not thinking of, the questions I don’t know to ask.

Imagining

How do you know the unknowns? You don’t.

I don’t know what he’d say. Something wise or caring probably, something that would fill my heart with warmth.

I have to imagine what these missing pieces are or might be.

Missing

I want his take on this shrub because I want what I am missing, and what I am missing is not just him but all the missing pieces of what he would say in this situation.

Or any situation.

I miss him, and I miss what I am missing, and I don’t know exactly what I am missing because it is missing.

A peach shrub is a small sweet joy

I wrote last year (the year before? what is time?), okay, a while ago, about the theme of Something To Look Forward To, about how vital it is to have sources of positive anticipation in your life.

Something to look forward to (a peach shrub).

Stay here, stay with us, there is going to be a peach shrub, and it is going to be delicious. I am infusing strawberry vinegar with cloves for us.

We will drink it with sparkling water from tall glasses with a metal straw. The light will be bouncing off the cottonwood trees, which are a vibrant shade of gold. Stick around, it will be so good.

Another fun thing

In addition to countering my fear of abandonment and fear of loss with infused vinegars and jars of fruit sitting in brown cinnamon sugar, I did something else with the gift of crushed strawberry vinegar.

I took a handful of dried cranberries and simmered them in a tablespoon of the strawberry vinegar and two tablespoons of water (I am at high elevation, if you are not then one tablespoon water should be fine) until they became plump and sticky.

These got added to warm golden rice along with diced jalapeño, it was a flavor combination for the ages.

Let’s come up with more flavor combinations for the ages. That’s something to look forward to too, right? Yes.

Fall

Here in the northern hemisphere at least, fall is here. It got a very late start in New Mexico, but it’s here with wild winds and fall color, with bursts of rain and surprise rainbows.

I love fall, and also it always comes with some melancholy, some trepidation, knowing that the cold and dark are coming, knowing that I am, as always, unprepared for the bitterest moments. I am going to have to tough it out like I always do.

Gotta stay ready.

Gotta stay ready (name the small joys)

There are lots of ways to stay ready of course.

Stocking up on tea lights. Making batches of soup stock to freeze. And of course, listing small joys, little delights I can look forward to.

Listing them, yes. Let’s name small joys. Let’s have an abundance of small joys that we can call on.

Like a dopamine menu — a big thank you to Alexis Reliford for bringing this to my attention, among many other great suggestions.

Or maybe it’s more like a things that work menu, because sometimes it’s hard to remember what dopamine feels like.

Things that help more than you think they will

I keep a running list in the category of [Things that help more than I think they will even if they don’t help as much as I want them to].

Here are some of mine in case that helps you figure out yours…

• Five minutes of stretching and rolling on the floor for example.
• A one song meditation.
• A DIY mini-pedicure by the front door.
• Massaging hands with sunflower seed oil.
• Heating pad. Tea. Favorite socks. Warming things. Or cooling things, depending on your season.
• Journaling (stone skipping) for a few minutes.
• Petting my imaginary dog who is also not-not a real dog, Ruthie Bean Bean, a stuffed animal toy puppy whose quiet reassuring soft company got me through my ordeal of a trip to Michigan and back – some day I will remember to post a photo of Ruthie Bean Bean so you can see their sweet face!

Ritual

Many of my small joys are rituals or ritualized.

Like making chocolate cinnamon banana bread for C&C Ritual Factory, aka Coffee & Cake Club which is sometimes Chai & Cake Club, my little pre-breakfast of sweetness and warmth.

Or massaging my wood bowls and cutting board with oil on new moon and full moon, spa day for the wood, it feels so happy, and then I am happy when the wood is happy.

A friend calls this a house-blessing, and while it is not quite the phrase my brain is looking for, there is something in there. Something about magic and intention, something about the way it calms me.

What calms me

There is the repetition element of ritual, the repeated movement is soothing, but also the repetition in the calendar, there it is again.

There is also room for newness, for innovation, for switching it up.

I am not married to doing it the exact same way every single time. I will do it the same way until the new way suggests itself, or until the old way runs its course.

Ritual as neurodivergent excellence.

What else am I looking forward to

Soup season.

Delicious hot beverages in a favorite mug.

Turtlenecks and beanies. Warm cozy everything in general.

I have a new scarf, it was a gift, I am excited to wear it constantly.

Something about the power of small doses of decadence

A few years ago, I briefly overcame my aversion to one-use kitchen appliances and got a fancy milk frother. I tend to forget that it exists in the summer, but when the cool weather arrives, and I take it out for the first Decadent Hot Beverage, that’s a lovely moment.

The other day I remembered that I have chicory and burdock root, so I made a decaffeinated Decadent Hot Beverage with these, some cinnamon and vanilla, a chai syrup I’d made for baking, and frothed up some oat milk to make it fancy. I might be a cowboy doing my chores, but my beverage game is top of the line.

And yes, it helped more than I thought it would. Something about festive, something about making something beautiful and extra-extra, just for me.

What else do we want to play with, in the category of Small Joys?

You can brainstorm your own list of things to try, things to look forward to, anything that might help.

It might even help more than you think it will, and even if it doesn’t help as much as you want it to (very normal, very relatable!), non-zero mood shifting is still helpful.

It all counts, and maybe it is also a form of fractal magic, which is to say that these seemingly small shifts are doing more work under the surface, and seeding good things for the future…

Some small sweet joys – any small sweet joy port in a storm, right?

I am lighting a candle for any and all small joys we can come up with, anything that supports you.

Postscript the first

Today was going to be a different topic, something I wrote the other day for us, and then the theme just felt a little heavy even though it was more about what to do about all the heavy stuff, so let’s seed as many small sweet joys as we can for now, and bring some hopeful energy into these chaotic and scary times for each other.

It couldn’t hurt, and maybe it will help.

Another candle for maybe it will help. A candle for possibility and expansiveness, for these ongoing practices in tending to the hope-sparks.

Postscript the second

Yes there will be a bonus essay this week, so if you need a reason to make a favorite beverage, there it is…

Come play in the comments, I appreciate the company

You are welcome to share anything that sparked for you while reading, anything that helped or anything on your mind, wish some wishes, process what’s percolating…

I am lighting a candle for us and our beautiful heart-wishes. What a brave thing it is to allow ourselves to want something better for us and for the world.

Or if there’s anything you’d like to toss into the wishing pot, the healing power of the collective is no small thing, companionship helps.

Whatever comes to mind or heart. Let’s support each other’s hope-sparks…

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A request!

If you received clues or perspective or want to send appreciation for the writing and work/play we do here, I appreciate it tremendously. Between Long Covid and traumatic brain injury recovery, things are slow going.

I am accepting support (with joy & gratitude) in the form of Appreciation Money to the Discretionary Fund. Asking is not where my strength resides but Brave & Stalwart is the theme these days, and pattern-rewriting is the work, it all helps with fixing the many broken things.

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