Making Soup

On hunger, music, and what actually feeds us

I love to cook soup, to eat soup, to have some leftovers in the fridge. This post is a sort of soup of ideas and contemplations, like a soup meditation.

Soup is basic and simple. You take what you have on hand, some bits of a dream, a thought that came up while you walked, a leftover glimmer you wrote on a bit of paper, something unfinished all to be transformed into something nourishing and maybe even inspiring. It’s definitely meant to be shared. Nobody gets rich from soup, but nobody walks away hungry.

I’ve been thinking about what actually feeds us, sustains us. Not just the body, but the deeper hunger, the one that remains no matter how much you pile on your plate or fill your bowl.

Continuing on from last week. Yes, I decided to stay here in Corfu, and very good that I did. My favorite musician here, from Greece but another island, was available to play with me. We’ve performed together over the years, and after my broken arm and bad thumb kept me from playing last year, I’m thrilled to play again.

Maybe even more than performing, I love rehearsals. In truth, just as I love revising a book, I could spend the rest of my life rehearsing and improving. There is no arrival, only the ongoing becoming.

We rehearsed in my friend’s house, twice this week, in a room with a high wooden ceiling that made everything we played sound so good. My original songs, some of his, where I wove in my poetry. Spanish medicine songs. Improvisations that took us somewhere different every time. Acoustic music with guitars, voice, ukulele, and percussion.

After our first meeting, nervous as I always am, I asked him to be honest. Did I still have it? Did I have enough juice to do a good show?

And more, he said. It’s so much fun to play with you.

I feel so grateful that in my early seventies I still have the passion to play and apparently still some juice left. Something happens when two people make music together and the connection goes deep. It takes you over with a kaleidoscope of vibration, of colors and feelings. I’m a shy person, maybe on the spectrum, who knows, but inside the music none of that matters.

It becomes the best soup. Nourishing, generous, alive. And what I live for.

I know something about this hunger from the inside.

With addiction, you get wrongly wired to believe that if you don’t get the fix, whatever it is, you are going to die. The craving feels that total, that urgent. Mostly you don’t die. You learn that in recovery. It can feel terrible, but if you can be with it, feel it, let it shift, it won’t kill you. And if you can stay with it long enough, you touch the place behind the craving, the place where your soul lives. Where it’s been hiding all along.

I worked hard to find my way there. I still do. The 12-step program, dance, music, the love of nature, these weren’t escapes. They’re the opposite of escape. They’re the path back to myself.

I don’t say this to claim any greatness. Only to mark the distance traveled. And to say that I know the difference now between what feeds me and what only makes me hungrier.

I got pulled into a show called Friends & Neighbors, a portrait of the ultra-wealthy, their Hamptons homes and helicopters and servants moving like ants. It made me think of some of what’s driving this time we’re in.

It tries to show the cracks, and the cracks are there. But what struck me most was the loneliness. They thought they were doing it right. Every acquisition, every upgrade, each one taking them further and further away from themselves. The singer I loved in the show — in the last episode I watched, she wasn’t singing. Just drinking, searching for something, anything to get away from herself.

I recognized that hunger. I’ve felt it. The difference is I found my way to the thing behind it.

That world is built to keep you reaching, too distracted to go anywhere near the craving’s source. And the world pays for it—the wild spaces shrinking, the land, the systems built to care for people and communities. The world I love, eaten alive by an appetite that was never really about any of it.

You go through that door, and you can’t find your way back.

This month I’ve been staying with friends in Corfu who have a small guest room attached to their house. A little desk, my computer just fitting. Cozy, safe. More than enough.

I practice. I write. I revise. Outside, Corfu does what Corfu does. It’s so pretty here, stuck in time (which I’m grateful for), the light, the olive trees, the sea not far away. The simplicity isn’t deprivation. It allows something real to happen. When you’re not busy consuming, you can create. When you’re not running from yourself, you can go to the thing behind the craving, and find out what’s actually there.

Every time I listen to Heather Cox Richardson, one of my political heroes helping me through this desperate time, she ends the same way: do what you can, do what is yours to do.

I have no power to stop the mad administration, to loosen the grip of the Trumps and Putins and Netanyahus, to slow the machine of greed that’s destroying the world I love. I resent it. I won’t pretend otherwise. But resentment without action is just more hunger.

So I bring what I have. My voice, my guitar, my poetry woven into a friend’s music in a room with a high wooden ceiling in Corfu. It isn’t much against the size of what’s broken. But it’s an offering. A blessing. A gift.

If only I could get them all dancing and singing—bring them back to themselves, to the thing behind the craving. That’s the work I’ve been doing my whole life, because it isn’t easy, because capitalism wants us far from ourselves, hungry and lost, reaching for whatever is most available.

But I know what’s available to me. I know what feeds me.

The concerts are coming. The soup is on.

Love to hear your soup of thoughts.