Salt

Why not saving the "good stuff" can help us practice loving life and letting go.

My favorite thing to add to anything I’m cooking lately, whether it’s a soup, a salad I’m throwing together, or eggs on toast, is the Garlic and Friends Blend Salt from the San Juan Island Sea Salt company.

My parents, Tracy and I were able to take a trip up to the San Juan Islands last year (we missed you, Will!), and it was absolutely magical - the wild coasts, a house where we could see orcas swimming by across the channel between islands and a seal that would come to poke around in the mornings, jellyfish floating below, verdant green hikes and everywhere, rugged beauty. It was a treat to spend some time in that far-flung corner of the world.

Before we joined my parents, we spent a few days outside Seattle with another pair of friends, Pat and Sarah, who took us to Whidbey Island. After another rambling day of walking up and down wide, wind-blown beaches and driving past rolling fields and barns, we stopped at a brewery with a little store beside it, which happened to sell San Juan Island Sea Salt.

I ducked in, wanting to get something to bring back for my brother; I found the company’s Garlic and Friends Blend, and drooled inside at the list of garlic, onion, leek, black garlic, and salt fresh from the Pacific and dried on the islands that made up that tantalizing little container. I bought one for Will, imagining him seasoning up steaks on the porch of “Little G” (his apartment); I had made it back to the table before I decided it would be an absolute shame if I didn’t buy one for myself, as well.

And now, I put it on everything. It’s going slowly, so I’m not too worried about the far in the future day I’ll be out of Garlic and Friends Blend San Juan Island Sea Salt, but I know it will come, eventually. A point of pause, but I still sprinkle away.

While hanging in the kitchen at Pacifica House last week, the care home for Hospice of the North Coast, where I’m in my counselor training, I found myself chatting with one of the nurses and a patient’s family member about coffee.

We were discussing the ins and outs of the espresso machine, and daydreaming about favorite cups of coffee and espresso we’d ever had; the family member shared that the best they’d ever tasted was from Jamaica’s Blue Mountain, where you can get bags of the stuff for a miniscule fraction of the prohibitively expensive price one can buy it for in the US. We all lamented that you can only bring back so much from these far-away places; sooner or later, that amazing thing, whether coffee or salt, will run out.

I had a quiet thought in the back of my mind during the entire conversation, that never had a reason to come out - “I’m so glad we all still choose to bring back even a bit of that thing, and that we used the heck out of it while we had it.”

As I put my San Juan Island Sea Salt on my salad yesterday, it began to dawn on me; there’s such poignant wisdom there around the cycles of life and relationship.

It’s not quite non-attachment, but moreso deep attachment, and grace in release. It’s the holding tight, then the glad, bittersweet opening of the arms to let go.

It also calls to mind the fine-china conundrum - if you always keep the “good stuff” stored away, the day may never come you actually get to eat off of it, or drink it, and even if you do on few and far between days, there are so many moments you denied yourself that richness of experience. And for what? To save it for something special? I’ve often seen folks arguing that the day-to-day is special, and inherently worth “the good stuff”. I wholeheartedly ascribe to this philosophy.

Often, we think if we save it, or protect it, we’ll never run out of it, we’ll never lose it. But things that don’t receive love and attention tend to lose their flavor over time, like that salt may, or like that coffee definitely would (although that family member keeps it stored with the care of a true connoisseur, so it’s staying fresh for a good while).

And I would be remiss not to remind us- we were having this conversation in the Hospice. The idea of moving reverently through letting go was like soft air hovering around that conversation, as it tends to be in every one of my days now that I’m in this work.

So, I feel that there is bravery in not rationing my San Juan Island Sea Salt, and in that family member relishing each up of that coffee from Jamaica. Each moment of sprinkling or sipping is a tiny way to practice the deep breath of life, and the deep exhale of letting things pass, as all things must. In and out we go of life’s cycles and rhythms.

Tiny moments of choosing to use one more pinch of salt, even when it means I’m one day closer to emptying the container, help me slip into the ease of in, and out.

It’s deep gratitude for the present, because denying that experience does not mean one day that salt will never be gone; no matter what, the container will empty, or I’ll miss out on a whole lot of life while not enjoying it. After all, to longingly stare at something that makes it all that much more beautiful and rich, and not to squeeze it tight, to deny ourselves the connection, feels much more painful at the end of the road. The alternative is the bittersweet ease that makes being human what it is - hold tight, then let go.

Good food and life are meant to be embraced. Knowing one day that both will end makes the bite sweeter, the hug deeper. It’s all practice for the big stuff.

So, cheers to you, family member, for enjoying that coffee ‘til it was gone, and I’m so deeply grateful for my San Juan Island Sea Salt every day. Every time I sprinkle it, a little bit of that island is in my kitchen with me, and life is savory sweet.

I think Tracy took this.