Taste Everything
Be it French chocolate or soul-stirring moments of beauty, here's a call to satisfy your hunger, passions, and deepest longings
“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
While traveling in France one year, my husband and I treated ourselves to a tiny, very fancy tin of chocolates. It came with this not-so-tiny set of instructions:
Plunge Into the Art of Tasting: To taste a great chocolate, take the time to awaken your senses. Observe the color, listen to the characteristic “snap,” appreciate the texture on your tongue and enjoy it. You must learn to distinguish the first, highly-volatile aromas, giving the chocolate its length. This is when you will perceive the warmer notes such as caramel and roasted nutty flavors.
With luscious-sounding instructions like these from Valrhona, maybe we don’t need an actual box of chocolates to wake up our taste buds and make us swoon with delight, (though I wouldn’t say no if you handed me one right about now).
It reminds me of the Netflix series Chef’s Table, which I love to watch because of how evocative it is. For someone who doesn’t cook, this is saying a lot.
Watching Chef’s Table is a holy moment. It elevates the culinary experience to new heights—of beauty, art, sensuality, spiritual devotion, wonder—like I’ve never seen on television before. Watch any episode, and you get a deep dive celebration of . . .
Passion and ritual
Delicacies and mouth-watering ingredients being gathered, smelled, tasted, chopped, stirred, fried, melted, coaxed, whispered to, and loved into new forms
Chefs telling their rich, messy, epic, and deeply moving personal stories
Magical table settings—from rustic campfires to elegant Michelin-star-rated dining rooms—that are nourishing eye candy in themselves
Drop-dead gorgeous locations and music
All of it together is a feast for the senses. For foodies and non-foodies alike, this show delivers, inspires, transports, and, most of all, feeds the soul.
If it sounds like I’m trying to sell you on something, I’m not. My gushing invitation, ultimately, is not about the show . . . nor the food . . . nor the rituals . . . nor how you set a table and enjoy a good meal.
In the end, it’s about what cultivating these things opens up in you…
And maybe even helping you to reach for that thing or passion that you’ve put off way too long; the thing that might give you your own taste of heaven. 1
Ahhh 🌺
Tune in with us to tune up — A journey in sensing*
What you just read is from “Savor,” Chapter 25 of my book A Year for You.
It is just a small taste (as it were) of this ongoing 10-week series
experience the power of your six senses — sight, taste, touch, smell, hearing, and inner knowing to
practice beginner’s mind
release what is holding you back
remember what is calling you forward
It’s not too late to join us!
The additional prompts and video below — with weekly nudges from me, full access to all content we’ve covered so far on this Journey to a Lighter You — is being made available to paid subscribers.
All for less than $1.15 a week.
Stir it up
