Vortexia's Secret

one of my old college friends had a saying that she borrowed from the title of a book by sark. "eat mangoes naked."

she loved saying it because it sounded so sexy. and really it is quite a fantastic experience. however, i have always thought that it held greater meaning. more of a way of living life. essentially, not just living life, but experiencing it.

to follow the naked mango eating example, you are going to experience it more that way. it is a sweet, fleshy, luscious fruit, hard to eat gracefully if not prepared by a trained chef, and extremely juicy. if you are naked, you know you can easily clean up the mess, so you don't worry as much where the juice goes. you taste it more, feel it more, experience it better.

all of life is really like that. you can find beauty anywhere if you have your eyes open for it. you can learn to like almost any food that you didn't like as a child if you really take the time to taste it. we often multitask food. how often do you sit quietly without other distractions and just eat your food? probably next to never. yet if you do, it can become addictive. i realized that once a couple months ago. so i turned everything off, sat down in a comfortable place with nothing but myself and my broccoli (always kind of a love/hate food for me), and really experienced it. turned out i loved it! if i multitasked it into watching the news and talking to a friend, though, i never would have learned to like it.

as for finding beauty everywhere, this was a lesson i learned extremely early in life. it is something that surprised me, even then, because it is a secret that most adults i knew did not understand. it happened one day when i was still in the single digits of my life. i was washing my hands at our bathroom sink and reached for the soap. it was in a seemingly hideous orange and white 70s style dispenser. i wondered why in the world we owned it. then i thought that somebody had to create it, somebody had to buy it. neither made it or bought it thinking it was hideous. so i started to really look at it. i looked at the pattern, the contrast, all the details. suddenly, i realized that it was beautiful after all. that seemingly simple exercise made me reexamine everything and realize that you can find beauty wherever you look. kind of like the boy in american beauty who made the flight of a plastic bag in an updraft seem poignant and graceful.

so let's all eat mangoes naked today.