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My Morning Mocha

No Apologies

latte art

I know I’m living in the kingdom of enough when a simple pleasure feels like a divine gift. For me this special treat is my morning mocha. One ordinary ingredient and two divine stimulants are required: milk, coffee, and chocolate. At home, with my espresso machine, I balance the three each morning to concoct not just a beverage, but a ritual.

First, I pull two shots of decaf espresso and take a whiff as I pull it out from under the brewhead. Then comes the cocoa. My favorite is Dagoba, which has little bits of dark chocolate mixed in with the cacao powder and is made in Ashland, Oregon from fair trade ingredients. The quote on the can says it all: “You can deprive the body, but the soul needs chocolate.” I pour nonfat milk into a small metal pitcher, add the cocoa, and place it under the steam wand as hissing fills the morning silence.

A tough barista can tell when the milk is hot enough by touching the bottom of the pitcher, but I prefer a thermometer. When it gets to 140 degrees, I briskly stir the steaming liquid to make sure all those chocolate bits are suffused into the hot milk and then pour it into my go-cup along with the espresso. Now the drinking ritual can begin.

If I correctly estimated how much milk to pour into the pitcher before steaming, I now have a small amount of intensely flavored hot chocolate left over, which I pour into a tiny espresso cup. For the past forty minutes I have been in high gear getting ready for work, but now a moment of stillness blesses the morning, like stepping through the door of a church when the sounds of the city fade behind you. I stand still, look out the kitchen window, and swallow my few sips of hot chocolate. The mocha itself, sealed in the thermal go-cup, comes in the car with me, not to be drunk until I am at my desk forty miles away in the Foothill Library.

What is it about a mocha? The alchemy of the espresso machine achieves a balance between intense flavors along with a sensuous mouth feel. A Dagoba mocha is hot and velvety, dancing the tightwire between bitter and sweet. It is elegant, complex, and completely grounded in nature. But I don’t really need to analyze it. I simply accept it as a token of affection from the divine.

What is the simple pleasure that delights your spirit?

A Temple in Time

On the winter solstice a few days before I turned fifty, I rose before dawn, smudged with burning sage, and drove to a park overlooking the ocean where I could walk in silence and plan a ritual for my upcoming birthday. Although I didn’t know it then, my musings that morning turned out to be the genesis for this blog.

The sickle of the old moon hung in the eastern sky, and frost glazed the fields. As the sun rose over the hills behind me, I knelt and touched my forehead to the earth “for all my relations.” Two days earlier I’d asked a friend who was turning seventy if she had any words of wisdom to share. “Know yourself and accept who you are,” she answered. Her advice was in my mind as I pulled the hood of my down jacket up over my head and walked towards the ocean.

From the cliff I watched sandpipers on the beach below race away from an oncoming wave, then chase it as it receded, and they reminded me exactly of the frenetic way that I plunge into activities, then rush through them so I can hurtle into the next item on my to-do list. I work fulltime, I commute, and I never have time for everything I want to do: read novels, garden, knit a sweater, hike, cook dinner for friends, listen to my beloved play love songs on the ukulele … Sometimes I also worry about money and being alone in my old age and whether I’m a good enough person, but mostly I’m tormented by a lack of time. Who was I? A person afraid of not having enough.

Yet here I was looking out at the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean in a wide open morning lush with stillness and winter sunlight. The night before, my writing sisters had sent me off into the silence of this sacred world with laying on of hands and blessings, and now the whole day lay before me. How could I really feel that I didn’t have enough?

Then an NPR story I’d recently heard on my way to work suddenly came to mind: about how climate change is making the world’s oceans so acidic that many sea creatures can no longer survive there. I gazed out at the Pacific. From up here it looked peaceful and pure. Further out beyond the shelter of Monterey Bay gray whales were hurrying south to the lagoons of Baja where they would mate and give birth in a few months. This blue ocean that stretched further than my eye could see had always seemed to me like the great mother, the epitome of bounty, yet in her unseen depths the creatures that called her home might be dying.

We actually don’t have enough, I thought. Not enough clean air to keep our climate stable, not enough oil, food, water …

But on the heels of this thought followed a crucial phrase: we don’t have enough if we keep using it as we have been. If we as a species somehow decided to start being good stewards, there would be enough. Maybe not a superabundance, but enough. And what was true of the human population on the planet was true for me in my personal life too. Yes, there are limits. My time in this body is finite, and I can only do so much, but if I recognize my limits and use my time, energy, and money wisely, I have enough, not so much that I can squander it, but enough for what is important.

Is that what this blog is all about? Triage and time management? When I told my sister about “The Kingdom of Enough,” she said, “So it’s about simplifying your life?” Well, yes, I imagine writing about the virtues of thrift and sustainable living, but I also envision more. Life is short, and we live in a crazy, consumer culture that is busy bombarding us with demands and desires, yet in the cave of every heart peace reigns. I want to explore how to touch that grace.

Later on that winter solstice morning, I climbed down to the beach and collected small gray stones polished smooth by the ocean, cradled them in my hand and hoped the years were polishing me in the same way. A little cove offered a meditation spot, and for a long time I sat alone with the sound of the surf and chirping birds. I felt like I was in a temple in time. Yes, constraints exist for me as an embodied creature, but in the life of the spirit there are no clauses or caveats. The soul has all eternity, and the power of love is infinite.