this is finding my way to God

Sometimes when it seems like all the world is gathering, I know it's best to fade away.

On Sundays I have a routine. I wake early, think about what to read or write, make and eat banana pancakes with chocolate chips because I can't read or write on an empty stomach, and then read or write what I had thought about before breakfast. On a good day I lose myself in whatever I'm reading or writing, and then meet a friend at the espresso bar around the corner from my apartment.

We walk to church.



Depending on your experience or perception of religious institutions, you may think of church as being a humorless, sedate place. Not mine. My church is for the extroverted. In fact, it's more like a rock concert than a nunnery, with the crowds of televangelical TV, minus the cheap suits.

As you walk up the stairs that lead into the school auditorium where church service takes place, you'll begin to hear the buzz. Someone will greet you at the door, and you might make half-hearted eye contact or ignore him completely. The moment you're inside, everything around you begins to pulse, and you're like a camera lens in the dark, whirring back and forth, searching helplessly for a focal point. People are darting in and out, greeting each other, smiling, laughing, trying to be affable and pleasant, finding eye contact, scanning the crowd for someone they know. The whole place devolves into a fuzzy, Impressionist painting, and I, for one, feel like I am on drugs.

I sit down to catch my breath, duck below the throng of bobbing heads. This scene is a chaotic musical number that seems to be in want of choreography, an acid-laced phantasmagoria of sprouting colors and spewing sounds. At least that's how I feel: overwhelmed, thrilled, anticipating exhaustion. This is the experience of sensory overload, where every stimulus seems to be layered with synesthetic elements: I can see the sounds coming out of mouths; every moving person is emanating musical vibrations; every wave of noise is dripping with color, as Pollock-like pigments thrown and smeared across a canvas. Now you might understand why an art museum, for me, is as, if not more stimulating, than an amusement park.

You know, both fear and excitement are processed by the sympathetic nervous system.

When the service begins, the crowd quiets. The lights dim, and the band begins to play, rousing the congregation with their indie-folk, poppy renditions of worship songs. I stay quiet, even as everyone around me begins to sing.

Here's how I return to center: by pausing, by listening, by letting the words fall into me, resting in me. Like eating a rich, decadent meal, when you let food linger in your mouth longer than you normally would so that you can actually taste the textures and flavors. Or like sucking on a piece of hard candy rather than chomping on it, which you do when your mouth is restless. No, this isn't the crunch of instant gratification; it's cradling the song in your entire body, letting it wash down you like a hot shower after a long day, when you're standing under the shower head, immobile, eyes closed. It's not letting the words merely pass through you, which can happen when you sing and then you're no longer singing these words of praise but rather just listening to yourself and the person next to you, and then trying to harmonize, and then listening for the bass line, and the drum line, and the guitar strum.

I'm trying to let these God-given words soften me, dampen me, stroke me. And this requires stillness. Which is difficult. A moment ago, my mind was frantically trying to find a parking spot on a busy city street. A moment ago, I was the drunken, catatonic fool, weaving through the crowd on all fours, looking for a lost key.

But now I retreat. Among the crowds, among the sounds, I retreat. I retreat not into myself, but into God's presence, which is neither a soundproof, padded solitary confinement cell nor a raucous bar scene. Those two places seem diametrically opposed, yet somehow, the feelings of loneliness, insecurity, and neuroses are the same in both. Everything is measured in relation to yourself, and it feels wrong, like geocentrism, but instinctively, that's how we cope.

That's not what it's like to be in God's presence, which so many people describe as ineffable, and yes, it's grand and it's mysterious and it's infinite, but it's also a sensation that courses through your entire body, like experiencing a beautiful dust storm in the desert for the first time, where your stillness agrees to play spectator to the almighty that passes, where a solar eclipse halts a moment in time, just by its strangeness and singularity. Where you're not even aware of your solitude or the fears of your body or the paranoia creep of your mind. It is basking in a space where you are overwhelmed by the weight of gratitude, and you're humbly reaching out for the wisdom of love. For the first time, being overwhelmed is not exhausting. Despite the noise and the people, I can imagine peacefully; I have found the arcadia of my mind. Here I meet God.

I have everything I need in this very moment. I am not in want.

We're constantly passing through things, trying to get to the destinations of this world as quickly as we can, wanting results, wanting big love, settling for skinny love, skimming the glassy surface of our shiny, glistening spheres, and then we're running in this direction and falling in the other.

By the end of service, I feel inebriated and elated, which are literally mutually exclusive for me because alcohol gives me hives and a headache, but this is neither the reckless delirium of inebriation nor the false pretense of momentary elation. I do not feel farther from this world, like I have escaped, but I feel more settled in it, more at peace with every dimension of my life.

When I leave the church building, I am moving in my own time and space, unaware. Nothing is too messy or ugly or scary. For today, I just want to be invisible. I slip out of sight, fade into the background, and make my way through the city, sweetly silent, joyful and full.

this is an onion meditation

To practice patience, I caramelize onions.

Caramelized onions are a delicacy well worth the wait. Not like standing outside a supposedly "amazing" brunch spot on a Saturday afternoon for two hours, only to be served soggy hash browns and half-assed rubbery eggs. Not like sitting on the SF muni for three times as long as you thought you would be and getting punched in the face and yelled at by some crazies before getting to your final destination. You see, learning patience is a work in progress.

(Don't get me wrong I do still have a soft spot for the SF muni, but I hate waiting in line for brunch.)

Luckily, those ambrosial, browned, and perfectly unctuous onions always taste as good as I remember.

The raw material you begin with, a round onion with crackly and peeling skin, keeps expectations low. An onion is a homely-looking thing, always a little dirty and rough. Very common. Used for soups and peasant stews. Sauteeing an onion is the beginning of a good stir-fry, but it's not an act that requires much thought or expertise. It's practically perfunctory.

On the other hand, caramelizing onions is a luxury, of both time and of the senses, a meditative act in the kitchen. By meditative, I mean it brings you into the consciousness of the onion, the slow gradations of its appearance and aroma as it makes contact with slow, relentless heat. Those slivers, little sunbathers basking in a shallow pan of oil. 

From the beginning, the onion awakens your senses. Begin slicing the onion, and do not turn your eyes away. Wear goggles, hold a lemon in your mouth, or confront the onion head-on, welcoming the sharp and turning odor that it diffuses into the air.

Scoop up the onion slices and drop into a heated pan of oil. Turn the heat down low.

At first contact, the onion jumps and sizzles. The hot oil pricks, a tingling surprise. The onion soaks up the oil, causing its flesh to loosen up. Soon its translucence will render softness. Then it begins to sweat, releasing water, the second round of onion tears. Its aroma is now the product of tears, rather than its cause. That familiar scent, the faint sweetness of onion sweat, cues you to turn on the kitchen fan.

You will be tempted to leave the onions momentarily and attend to some less important matters, distractions. Do as you must, but beware of the onion's fragility when it is left on the stovetop unattended.

You'll return to find dark edges on your onion slices, the fire's fray, perhaps darker than what is ideal, but continue on, gently nudging the onion slivers around the pan with your spatula, pushing them from one side to another. Let your spatula tread delicately, avoiding abrupt scraping. Shriveled slivers, previously unnoticed, stick to the side of the pan.

Let the day pass by, knowing you are invested in making your kitchen a hallowed place. Turn off the kitchen lights for a moment. It is okay to let the onions caramelize silently in dark. At least see what it feels like.

You'll know when your onion slivers have browned sufficiently. They will stick together, adhered by a brown syrupy glaze. This glaze is your reward. Savor it. You began with so much and you've reduced it, from light to dark, from raw and untamed, to soft and wilty and sweet. But don't be fooled by the mere handful of caramelized onions you now have. Caramelized onions are like caviar, to be doled out in small portions, to be known and proclaimed as special. In your mouth, the taste will confirm this as true.

You've been here awhile, and now it's time to move on. Open a window, drink some water. Let the caramelized onions cool, and enjoy the steady peace that the act of caramelizing onions has washed over your entire being. It may not last for long.

this is bread breadth breath

*On this Sunday afternoon, I am standing in my kitchen, which is collecting heat like a greenhouse on this unusually hot day in San Francisco. September is the beginning of an Indian summer. There are piles of books on the kitchen table, a dusty bin full of ski goggles and headlamps and other outdoor contraptions that now seem more nostalgic than utilitarian, and trails of breadcrumbs everywhere, the memento minutiae of yesterday's kitchen craftwork.

*Like most things in life, the work of cooking ends up having little permanence, but food is glaringly ephemeral because we confront its disintegration and disappearance everyday, biding time as food rots in our refrigerator or as it is passes through our mouths in mere seconds. We fight its transience by preserving, canning, and freezing. I fight its transience by photographing. And hoarding. And collecting. And writing it all down. I struggle to accept ephemera. I'm an archivist.

*I sweep away the breadcrumbs, even though I'm tempted to eat them.

*The stove is unusually crowded today. There's the cast iron skillet that's been sitting around for a week, in cleaning limbo (mostly clean, but not completely due to my compulsion to google "cast iron cleaning" every time I use and clean the skillet, just in case I'm doing something wrong) and the kettle that I never seem to take off the stove. Half of the stove is occupied by my laziness. On the other half: a pot of boiling salted water and a pan on low heat, filled with glistening slices of onion. The oven is heated to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. I crack open the window so that I can breathe better.

*"Breathe" is on my to-do list.

*The year has passed by breathlessly. A friend once told me, quite literally, you only inhale; you never seem to exhale. He was commenting on the way I breathe, or the way I don't. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to discover, for the umpteenth time, that how I approach my need for air and food is just about how I approach everything. Inhale everything I possibly can; forget to exhale because there's no time.

*"Remember to exhale," I tell myself.

*Breathing doesn't work like that. It doesn't run on reminders.

this is where i've settled

*I am currently living in a small apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco. It's not a main street, but it's not a quiet street either. There's a lesbian bar on the corner, and on occasion, I'll hear Mexican karaoke when I'm about to go to bed. The elderly Asian woman across the street rummages through our recycling bins on Monday nights after we put them out, taking all of our bottles and cans to sell back for the California Cash Refund credit.




*My room is small but cozy. The bed takes up approximately 85% of the room; I use half of it for book storage. Even though my room is about half the size of the other bedroom in the apartment, I chose it because I like the light that pours in through the windows in the mornings and through the afternoons. I don't mind the smallness because I don't need that much space. I'm still attached to some of my material things, but my intention is to live a more compact life.





*Material things, case in point. Necessary candles, post-its, eye mask, ear plugs, glasses, lollipops, pens, water bottle...



*This is most of my room. I can't get much more my room into a single photograph.



*My two houseplants and some empty vases. I try to take good care of these houseplants but find myself googling houseplant ailments every other day. This does not bode well for future pets or children.



*The hallway from my bedroom. The main door is at the bottom of those stairs. The bathroom (which houses a tub that has talons as feet!) is at the top of the stairs. To the right, the kitchen, the dining room, and the laundry room. The closed door is my roommate's bedroom.



*This is the living room. We have an electric fireplace, empty book shelves, and a television I do not know how to operate.



*I wash dishes about four times a day so I spend a lot of time in this little nook.



*The dining room. My mom gave me the cactus. My roommate received those orchids in the mail. There is a copy of The Economist on our table but it belongs to neither my roommate nor me. We receive all of Adam Flynn's mail, and that is his subscription. Who is Adam Flynn? I do not know, but we have a stack of Adam Flynn's magazines and other paraphernalia in case he is ever interested in reading them.



*On most weekday nights, I choose the quiet life that my apartments, a respite from the production and attention of work. But the world outside, in all its grit and color, is the perfect counterpoint, and I'm reminded every time I step outside that there is so much to see and so many places to explore. Everyday I navigate the dichotomy between the indoors and the outdoors; I struggle with sitting in a cubicle for so long, and sometimes I am scared to walk anywhere at night. Some days I want to sit at my dining table all day long and on others I find myself bolting down 18th street, sucking in all the fresh air I can get as I weave through the Mission and into the Castro. I'm still trying to figure out all sorts of balance in my life right now, but I love being out of an institution and just living in the world, which can be messy in a really beautiful way. Just living in the world right now, and trying to make the most of where I am, who I am, and all the things I have here with me...