Salt

We are moving.  I especially love to pack the kitchen.  This room houses my favorite objects, activities and emotions.  Nourishment happens here.  Healing, too.  Earthen dinnerware, smooth wooden bowls and their counterparts, the more worn wooden utensils, milk white glass, spices, herbs and various little bowls, jars and boxes of salts.  While caressing and wrapping each treasured tool of creation and kitchen alchemy, I asked myself, "What is your favorite flavor?"  As shocked by my betrayal of sweet as I am, salty it is.  I salt nearly everything to some degree, pink Himalayan salt being my grains of choice.  I like to touch the salt with my fingers, no shakers here.  Salt is something special.   

It isn't just my palate that savors and sometimes craves the bite of salt, but soul as well.  Salt evokes the ocean, abundant primal mother of all, and her gifts. Healing waters that purify the body and soul, seaweeds that deeply nourish, and the traces of her past left all over the globe.  No human is left unaltered by her presence.

In ancient times salt was always to accompany an offering to our gods, and in the Bible, Jesus refers to the earnest people of the world as "the salt of the earth".   Alchemists thought salt would "fix the volatile spirit", binding soul to matter.  I share their belief that salt is very akin to soul.

As salt preserves food, so does soul preserve body, or life itself.  Salt brings out flavors otherwise dull, while soul enhances the life experience, allowing us to savor all the morsels of goodness the universe has to offer.  Opposite of preservation, salt offers us destruction as well.

It was a common Roman practice to spread salt in the fields of the conquered, rendering the earth barren.  But this is only temporary.  I have always treasured destruction, and tried to accept and embrace these elements of my Self, because with destruction comes renewal, rebirth, creation.  Sometimes we must start with nothing.

So are my thoughts.  Even procrastination tastes better with a little salt.