Photo by Roberto Carlos Roman Don on Unsplash
Prologue
Yes, for many people in many circumstances, it is good to be "mindful in the present moment." Such mindfulness involves a combination of relaxed yet alert attention to what is happening inwardly and outwardly. The mindful person is often pictured as inwardly composed, serene, and attentive. She or he is non-anxious and present.
If this picture is accurate, then I suggest that the universe also needs un-mindful and somewhat anxious people who are ebullient, effervescent and sometimes beautifully distracted. They are not centered, but are instead always on the way into something new. endowed with a healthy sense of curiosity and adventure. Like Diana Kennedy, featured below, with her passionate love of Mexican food.
Exuberant personalities are windows into that creative advance into novelty of which Whitehead speaks: a creative advance which is the universe itself in its restless craving for novely, lured by a God who likewise loves novelty and surprise. Perhaps exuberant personalities reveal, and participate in, the restlessness of God. Here's my point. In the house of spiritual virtues there are many rooms. One of them is exubrrance.
- Jay McDaniel, April 17, 2021
Yes, for many people in many circumstances, it is good to be "mindful in the present moment." Such mindfulness involves a combination of relaxed yet alert attention to what is happening inwardly and outwardly. The mindful person is often pictured as inwardly composed, serene, and attentive. She or he is non-anxious and present.
If this picture is accurate, then I suggest that the universe also needs un-mindful and somewhat anxious people who are ebullient, effervescent and sometimes beautifully distracted. They are not centered, but are instead always on the way into something new. endowed with a healthy sense of curiosity and adventure. Like Diana Kennedy, featured below, with her passionate love of Mexican food.
Exuberant personalities are windows into that creative advance into novelty of which Whitehead speaks: a creative advance which is the universe itself in its restless craving for novely, lured by a God who likewise loves novelty and surprise. Perhaps exuberant personalities reveal, and participate in, the restlessness of God. Here's my point. In the house of spiritual virtues there are many rooms. One of them is exubrrance.
- Jay McDaniel, April 17, 2021
Exuberance is:
Abounding, Ebullient, Effervescent, Restless,
Billowing, Leaping, Bubbling, and Overflowing
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"Exuberance is an abounding, ebullient, effervescent emotion. It is kinetic and unrestrained, joyful, irrepressible. It is not happiness, although they share a border. It is instead, at its core, a more restless, billowing state. Certainly it is no lulling sense of contentment: exuberance leaps, bubbles, and overflows, propels its energy through troop and tribe. It spreads upward and outward, like pollen toted by dancing bees, and in this carrying ideas are moved and actions taken."
- Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a John P. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow |
Example: A Passion for Mexican Food
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Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy
Directed by Elizabeth Carroll
A look at the lively life of the world's leading expert on Mexican food.
Reviewed by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
Reposted from Spirituality and Practice
"It is the infectious energies of exuberance that proclaim and disperse much of what is marvelous in life. Exuberance carries us to places we would not otherwise go."
-- Kay Rutherford Jamison in Exuberance
People like Diana Kennedy stand out from the crowd. They are energized by what they do, and they share their passion with others. Like the character Zorba the Greek, she has many names. Some people call this 97-year-old wizard the Julia Child of Mexico; others see her as the Mick Jagger of Mexican cuisine.
Originally from England, she moved with her husband to Mexico some 60 years ago. Now she lives alone on a ranch in Mexico in an ecologically sustainable house complete with solar power. In her greenhouse, she grows many of the ingredients for her cooking. For many years, she has left this retreat and driven to villages all over Mexico to research to learn more about the foods and flavors of the different regions. "I sort of went where the wind blew me, you know, out of curiosity," she explains. "I said, I just have to learn this."
"Don't boil. Simmer." This is just one piece of advice she passes on to the women and men, many of them chefs with their own restaurants, who come to learn from her; they consider it an honor just to be in the presence of this kinetic woman. After trading barbs with a photographer, he calls her "feisty."
"Never let me hear you say a cookbook is expensive," she says, "a novel you read just once, a cookbook is on your shelf for 30 years." This is certainly true of her nine cookbooks. She has won two James Beard Awards and was decorated with an Order of the Aztec Eagle from the Mexican government. She is widely acknowledged as the world's academic expert on Mexican cooking.
Director Elizabeth Carroll has made a sprightly and entertaining documentary about a talented English woman who has done more to promote Mexican food than anyone else on the planet. She includes interviews with chefs Alice Waters, Jose Andres, Rick Bayless, Gabriela Camara, as well as some taking classes at the cooking school she runs out of her house. You'll love her stories, her cooking demonstrations, and her interactions with the village cooks she has learned from and so admires. And if you don't already have one of her cookbooks, you'll be ordering one during the closing credits!