There is an old Taoist teaching that speaks of pu—the uncarved block, the original nature before the world’s chisel shaped us into something complicated. The sages say we spend our lives wandering far from this simplicity, only to discover the path home was never lost—merely forgotten.
And sometimes, it is a rice cake. A warm klepon. A handful of roasted peanuts wrapped in yesterday’s newspaper.
The Sufi poet Rumi once wrote that we are not drops seeking the ocean—we are the ocean in a drop, longing to remember.
When you bite into that familiar sweetness, something stirs. Not in the mind, but deeper—in that quiet chamber the Persian mystics called the qalb, the spiritual heart. The taste does not bring back mere memory. It brings back you—the you who existed before worry, before ambition, before the thousand masks we learned to wear.
The Buddha spoke of shoshin, beginner’s mind—that state of openness before experience became expectation. A child eating a snack does not analyze. Does not compare. The child simply tastes, and in that tasting, becomes one with the moment.
We, who have grown old in seeing, forget how to see.
But the snack remembers. The snack waits.
Perhaps this is why the Hindu sages taught that the Self—the Atman—is never truly touched by time. The adult is a costume. Beneath it, the eternal child still sits cross-legged on a worn mat, fingers sticky with palm sugar, watching afternoon light make golden rivers on the floor.
One bite, and the rivers return.
So eat slowly, wanderer. Let the ancestors of your own heart speak through that simple flour and salt. What seems small may be a door. What seems ordinary may be the face of the Beloved, disguised.
This is the secret the philosophers knew: that the sacred hides in the mundane, waiting for us to grow humble enough to find it again.
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