What are the Flavors of Your Life?
Taking a bite of the wasabi. Wow! | Photos by Adrienne & Dani
"The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience."
~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Mary and I celebrated our one year wedding anniversary earlier this month. And I wanted to share a piece of our wedding ritual with you.
When Mary and I started to plan our wedding we knew we wanted a special ceremony but we also knew we definitely didn't want ritual that was heteronormative or tied to the patriarchy. So we looked at what a wedding ceremony generally involved and then edited our plan according to our own inspiration and desires.
Ritual is essential in my life. It's an anchor, a constant and a place I lean into with deeply meaningful creativity. I grew up in a Jewish home that was more "bagely" than "temply" (as writer Anne Lamott likes to say) but Jewish ritual. My mom baking challah on Shabbat, our family lighting candles at Chanukah and most importantly, the entire shebang of Passover from the seder plate to the meal to reading the Haggadah (the story of the Exodus) to the songs we sang every year were essential and that all made its imprint on my identity.
I guess that gave me a fondness for using metaphor and symbolism (often food, Jews love food symbolism!) in my rituals. But I also love candles and objects and witnesses!
We decided to use the metaphor of flavors to dive into the richness of relationship and life. And so we asked a pair of dear friends (shout out to Chad and Claire) to gather six foods before the wedding, one for each of six flavors: salty, sour, bitter, sweet, spicy, and umami (savory), and three of those were specifically from Chico (more meaning and connection!). Then during the ceremony our officiant (shout out to my cousin Joel) said:
We will pass six foods, each representing the six tastes of flavor and of life. These are the experiences that you feel are fundamental to the home you are building together. Foods are ephemeral, a reminder of the (Japanese) principle of Wabi Sabi, the preciousness of life. And, the container of these foods also hold meaning: It is a Kintsugi platter, broken and put back together with gold. This ritual shows us that your lives, and life together, must contain it all for them to be meaningful. We are more beautiful for our brokenness, highlighting the broken places with gold.
Then Joel offered us a taste at a time and spoke about the meaning of each:
Sour - Lemon. Sour is a sudden pucker of your lips, the sharp pang of “Oh! That was unpleasant.” But it’s also the resilience and fortitude built in the hard moments, the times when you found an inner strength to overcome. May this bite of sour lemon humble and awaken you to each other.
Salty - Roasted and salted almonds (Chico). Salt is a sensation of contradiction; it is both additive and subtractive; it’s what gives flavors a boost but also the texture of our tears. It dries and moisturizes. It takes and gives. It’s necessary for life - but too much, hurts.
Spicy - Wasabi. Spiciness is unpredictability, excitement, passion, fiery moments. Life isn’t worth living without it - but too much, and it can overwhelm. May this bite of wasabi keep every day a spicy adventure between you two. (You can see me tasting wasabi in the photo above.)
Bitter - dark chocolate. Bitter is strange - we talk about bitterness like it’s sadness, but bitterness is actually necessary complexity. It’s moments of quiet endurance, the sacrifices made for one another, the aftertaste of growth. May this bite of dark chocolate bring you wisdom and patience in complexity.
Umami - Rumiano Dry Jack Cheese (Chico). Umami is the savoriness, the hidden, inexplicable, overwhelming depth of flavor in food, but also in life. May this bite of Rumiano (Mary's family's company's cheese) Dry Jack bring you an unspoken understanding, impossible to define but richly fulfilling.
Sweet - Chico honey, and a Fuji apple. Sweetness is joy, and the revelry the two of you have in facing every day. The joy in finding each other late in life, the joy in building a new life together, the joy in being here. With this bite of Chico honey on a fuji apple, may you feel nothing but joy today, and all the rest of your days.
This incredible ritual did something powerful on our wedding day. It kept us very present in the moment, helped us focus on what was right in front of us, and with Joel's help, turned the story of our life together into delicious poetry. Unforgettable, not just for us, but for every witness in the room.
Rituals have ancient roots but they can also be modern, responsive and personal. Our ancestors knew that we benefit from using symbolism, metaphor, objects, and creativity to acknowledge the milestone moments of life—endings and beginnings, moments of reckoning and transformation, thresholds between one time and another—thus creating a container to hold the person/people going through these milestones.
I've always crafted rituals in my personal life and in my work. I've taught my students how to craft their own rituals. I believe you get to give yourself permission to make up your own meaningful rituals, too.
You may feel like rituals are something "out there," something created "a long time ago" or by some higher authority than you. But rituals are really just practices that are invented by someone who wants to mark an occasion with an act that makes the moment memorable, holy and/or sacred, not necessarily in a religious context but in a personally meaningful one.
