Comfort Comes From How You Live, I Think
Woods Walking at Witch Hole, Black Bean Soup, and Wallace Stevens
Sometimes, when the world of humans seems to be only focused on power and greed, the universe sends you something that just sort of makes your heart flutter and you stop for a moment and let what you were just given a chance to really seep in.
Anne Lamott wrote in the Washington Post almost exactly a year ago that for her it was this quote from Albert Einstein: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
She talks about the big miracles, writing, “There are the obvious miracles all around us—love, nature, music, art. We drunks who somehow got sober call this the central miracle of our lives. Some of you have children you were told you couldn’t have. Some of you were sent home to die, years ago. And have you ever seen a grain of sand under a high-powered microscope? It looks like a jewelry store.”
When I think of the quest for more feelings of comfort, I think about that Einstein quote, but I don’t necessarily think of the big miracles, but the small ones. The ones that happen every single day of one small life like mine: the soft feel of a cat purring on your lap, the regal beauty of a maple tree reaching toward the heavens, the sweet taste of a crisp apple. The fact that I get to walk and breathe and see and smell. Those sort of things.
There’s a beautiful woman in my town, who I won’t name because I don’t want to embarrass her, who posts many mornings about things that do not suck. It’s her form of gratitudes, I think, but she makes it cool. She’ll post about puzzles, the quiet time as our island wakes for a new day, the sound of ice crackling, the moment a deer lifts her head to see the world. She often takes photos and shares the world as she sees it.
What a gift, right? To get to know someone like that? To see the generosity she approaches her days with, her community with.
And she reminds me that there are all these moments that are miracles. We just have to remember that they are there especially in times that feel so hard, so overwhelming, when you feel so powerless.
And if you let yourself go into those beautiful miracle moments? To breathe into them fully and just—experience them?
That moment is not just a miracle. That moment is comfort, too.
THE POEM
The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Copyright Credit: Wallace Stevens, "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf, 1954)
THE PHOTOS
We were out walking around Witch Hole Pond and there were the most adorable ice formations around twigs. They reminded me a bit of ice parasols for winter fairies.
This is one of the carriage roads around Acadia National Park which is on the Maine island where we live. In the winter, there are hardly any people on the roads. There’s this beautiful comfort that happens walking on them. Woods walking is super comforting to me. It has been ever since I was a kid stomping around in New Hampshire, hoping for magical things to happen. I didn’t quite realize that magical things were happening all around me, you know?
This morning, these spots are covered with snow.
THE SOUP—BLACK BEAN SOUP
It’s a cooking soup recipe redone. Why? Because I’ve been working for over 12 hours and I’m not done.
Yes, folks. I’m dialing it in for this one. My apologies!
Black Bean Soup Because The World Sucks Sometimes & You Need Comforting
Sometimes the world sucks and you need a dark soup to match your feelings. Am I right? You can never have enough black bean soup recipes. Can you?
This recipe is pretty easily halved.
THE INGREDIENTS
3 tbsp olive or vegetable oil
2 whole onions (chopped)
6 whole garlic cloves (chopped/pressed)
3 ribs celery (chopped)
1 whole carrot (chopped)
5 tsp cumin
.5 tsp red pepper flakes or hot sauce (to taste really)
60 oz. black beans (canned, drained)
4 cups of water or broth
2 tsp lime juice
.5 cup cilantro (optional, to taste)
cheddar (if you want to make a Martha)
HOW TO MAKE IT
Heat olive oil in soup pot over medium heat.
Stare at it until it shimmers.
Sigh dramatically.
Throw in the onions, celery and carrot.
Sigh again because honestly? Sometimes sighs are comforting.
Put in salt, blood pressure be damned.
Stir once in awhile. Eventually the vegetable will get soft.
“Eventually” is 10 to 15 minutes.
Add in the smelly things – garlic, cumin and red pepper flakes.
Wonder if you’re a smelly thing? When did you last bathe? Was it before 2018? Join the club.
Cook until things smell more than you do – 30 seconds.
Add beans. Add broth.
Put the heat on medium high and watch it simmer. Reduce it so it only simmers gently. If only YOU were simmering gently, but honestly? The state of the world makes you SIMMER INTO ROARING, doesn’t it? Yes. Yes. It does.
Soup is not you though. So simmer GENTLY for 30 minutes, or else it will boil over and stick to the pot and believe me, you do not have the emotional reserves to deal with that mess.
Put about 4 cups into a blender (make sure not to overload your blender because it is hot and you will get burned and you probably don’t have the medical insurance to deal with that if you are an American).
Blend carefully.
You can also use a hot-pink immersion blender if you want.
JUST BE CAREFUL!
Put the blended stuff back in the soup pot. Mix. Add in cilantro, lime juice, salt and pepper. Sprinkle some Martha on or sour cream if you’re into it. Maybe some slivered almonds?
Sigh.
Eat it.
Sigh more.
Lean into the moment and feel… What? Yes, it is. Comfort.
I cannot find where I adapted this recipe from. It is basically everywhere. But everywhere doesn’t include Martha, the cheese blob. So, there’s that.
BONUS COOLNESS
Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center has monthly calendars that are meant to help with happiness. This seems like a lovely and kind thing that might be able to help some of us feel more content?
LINKS AND CITATIONS
Age makes the miracles easier to see
(Washington Post, January 17, 2024)
Copyright Credit: Wallace Stevens, "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf, 1954)