Imagine this.
It’s early summer 2008 and you’re standing in the lobby of a stuccoed hotel somewhere in Toledo. That’s “Toll-aye-doh” not “Toll-ee-doh.” Spain, not Ohio. Your first time to ever visit. You need to send an email to your mother and your new husband, neither of whom is on the trip with you, neither of whom got to try the paella two days ago at the rickety table in that sun-glazed Madrid alley, neither of whom sipped the chocolate or sampled the churros. Now’s the time to tell them about it, about all of the bits and bites. If you don’t, you’re afraid you’ll forget and won’t get the details just right. You really do need to catch these details while they’re brightest.
The man behind the front desk is so short. He stands on a stack of books, three volumes high, staring off into the middle distance. Encyclopedias, maybe? Dickens? Dickens would be especially good for elevating oneself, you think. He looks tired, and you wonder for just one second what the whole rest of his life looks like. The dark circles under his eyes have stories to tell.
You need his help so you pull your chin up, square your shoulders and don a smile. Your Spanish isn’t very good, and you hope to make up for it with a thick slathering of friendliness.
So you ask him. This stout, aging man behind the desk looks at you, unblinking, and you wonder if he’s heard you or if you only muttered the words inside your own head, failing to actually verbalize them. It’s been years since you took any Spanish classes, and you navigate the ins and outs of each new conversation in this country like a sailor fighting for ownership of her sea legs. Scared to death.
“Que?” The space between his brows lessens, his forehead wrinkling into a staircase of confusion.
Rife with ineloquence, language flows between the two of you in fits and starts; it takes a few tries to figure each other out. Your eyes meet and you see that his are kind, expectant. You think he’s looking for something; a connection maybe.
“Oh. Lo siento,” you murmur, sheepishly. I’m sorry. You try again. “Ummm. Tienes una computadora con la red?” Do you have a computer with the Internet?
La red. You’ve excavated the dusty word from the back recesses of your brain’s warehouse, where all of the debris and stockpiled knowledge from middle and high school lie in wait.
“Ah, si. Ven aqui.” You follow the man into a small room that sits just off the main lobby. One computer is perched on a desk set against the far wall under large, light-filled windows. Your faces reflect in its glassy gray screen and you think he looks a little happier now, satisfied.
“La red.” He says, making typing motions with the fingers on both of his hands. “The Net. You write in the net, in the web.”
A sudden shyness brings a reddening about your cheeks that feels foreign. Stepping in and out of a language that isn’t your own comes with a particular brand of vulnerability that you wear like a mask over which you have no control.
“Gracias,” you say again, as you begin to type.
You write about the charms of Bomba rice; of saffron, sweet green peas, and the most tender calamari you’ve ever tried. A deep satisfaction comes in the telling and retelling of these small yet remarkable moments of Spanish dining and the new, unforgettable foods it entails. You find them again with ease, these moments, with a grace that evades you when asked to recount other aspects of your trip; the museums, gardens, and Moorish cathedrals. It is the moments of taste, texture and smell as they belong to the foods of Spain that have you rapt; these are the experiences you share with truest excitement.
Time passes in a vacuum. Has it been hours? Perhaps. You relive these foods and flavors with such relish. You write and write and write, hitting send only after it’s all been told. You’d gotten caught up in all of the words and ideas and culinary inspirations that, as if in a parallel universe, are now flying through the tangled and vast web, trapped forever.
The same, incidentally, will prove true for you.
***
People describe passion as a thing that burns, brandishing all in its path. We all might come with them, with passions built right in, locked inside the cage of us. But we don’t all get so lucky as to find them. But when you do – when you find yours – it’s important not to drop it. Don’t let go of it, of the thing with the potential to set your soul on fire. It might be museums, gardens, or Moorish cathedrals. It might be food. This is where our pilot lights catch, right there in the discovering. It ignites us, smoldering steadily with a power that can alter us down to our bones.
That day, there in a light-splashed room inside a hotel in Toledo, a great love of my life walked right up to me and said hello. And that was it. A seed, planted. For all of my subsequent adoration, it charted the whole course. Arm in arm, the simple pleasure of writing about food escorted me on a creative journey of self-discovery I didn’t even know was possible. Our interests and passions can introduce us to parts of ourselves we’ve never met, hidden deep down where you can’t see or feel them. But they’re there, just waiting for their surfacing.
I took that trip to Spain the way one takes allergy medication. I’d quit graduate school not long beforehand, effectively abandoning all of the hopes and dreams that came included in that tidy package, right along with the textbooks and student housing. So began a kind of hollowing. My former aspiration was readily supplanted by a strong desperation that carried me around on its back for a while. Hoping to ward off the itchy, uncomfortable symptoms of an ensuing quarter life crisis, I sought relief in a faraway map dot I’d never visited. When the opportunity to visit Spain presented itself, I snatched it up and swallowed it whole.
Take two weeks off, and call me in the morning.
***
The pursuit of wonder can awaken dormant parts of ourselves that patiently wait in the dark, ready to blow our minds if we let them. Sleeping giants. Creativity and passion are born here, from these vestiges of curiosity that ask nothing but to be followed, if only for a little while. We collect the building blocks of interest and wait to see if anything takes shape. If we come up empty handed, fine. It isn’t a hollowness, this space that forms when things don’t go according to plan. It’s not nothing, as I’d taken to viewing it in my quarter-life, existential crisis but rather, a landscape for opportunity.
We learn so much from what doesn’t grow. We can dig for truths and meaning as we wade through the rubble, through the boneyard of interests once held. Calcified ruins such as these carry a kind of beauty in their barrenness. They can be used, those pieces. Rising from ashes, they can be transformed into a shiny new dream – a renewed interest – taking shape like blown glass.
We’re all constantly doing this as we walk through the world; recycling, reexamining, and repurposing the stuff that just doesn’t fit anywhere. No matter how far and wide we may roam on this planet, the greatest adventures – the wildest discoveries – are always buried inside ourselves.
This small-yet-mighty awakening of mine in Spain had less to do with my geography at the time than my geology – my own makeup. I was evolving – becoming more of myself – and I hadn’t the first clue how to handle it, this internal quaking. What felt like the end of the world at the time, was really just the start of a new era. It was normal, predictable, and almost charmingly cliched’ in all its angsty, twenty-something drama. But it was earthshattering all the same.
I’ve yet to find a more effective method for self-discovery than the pursuit of creative interests. We travel inward, mining down to our cores and back up to the surface, just searching for gems. Sparks fly sometimes, sure. But not always. In fact, not most of the time, I don’t think. So often we court these interests of ours and they lead us nowhere, turning to stone.
Sometimes, though, they lead us back to ourselves. Sometimes, we get diamonds.
***
Paella. It’s little more than rice, some humble vegetables and a scattering of sea-born treasures. Together, they form a dish that impacted me so much, it launched a forever love of sharing food publicly. Therein was the inkling, the clue previously unknown to me, that sharing food and recipes was a passion of mine, a deep-set craving. Not the cooking of food, I’d already known I loved that. I’m talking about the discussing of it, the showing and telling. My trip to Spain, and my attempts to bottle up my delicious moments and share them in the red, was the very beginning of this. The big bang.
With faith, curiosity, and courage in tow, we fumble our way into our own mysteries, just collecting clues as we wade into the dark.
