As you might know Maida and I had a baby girl, Florá Inés, a couple months ago and the only way to describe the experience of late is pure magic.
I woke this morning exploring the thought of magic in my waking dream state, and thought I would write a little about it. There exists variations of magic, but the magic I’m talking about is the infinite beauties beyond comprehension around us constantly, unlike the common view of magic that is of tricks and slight of hand.
As a young man getting interested in food I was enamored and blown away by restaurant’s like where I worked at, Alinea, who where creating magic in settings commonly reserved for simply having a meal. As a 19 year old in that kitchen it felt like I had joined the army, but I always felt surrounded by magic. I now wonder if it’s just me getting older or if restaurants have lost their magic. I haven’t been blown away by a food experience in a while and maybe it’s the situation of me knowing too much about the world itself, but part of me feels that the common understanding of magic and trickery has become how things are created these days. New things open that feel formulaic and variations of something else and I can’t help but think that there is a lack of seeing the magic around us.
When I think about why we go out to eat, I believe that at the very heart of it all we are looking for the feeling of being taken care of, like at grandmas house as a kid where you could have anything and everything. There is a reason grandma’s chile, or whatever grandmas make, always taste better. For me grandma Mary’s house was a place where in hindsight the objective and practical world didn’t exist, only an ever flowing amount of love and magic.
/ shed wasn’t built on this realization, but has slowly been evolving in that direction. In all it’s stages though / shed has been a means of finding, creating, and sharing the magic of the natural world and specifically of Northern NM.
The key it seems is to be perceptive of the magic already present around us. On our ‘estancia’ ( a landed estate, cattle ranch, a place of rest ) we are bombarded with daily tasks that can quickly become daunting if we aren’t careful. There is always a moment where I stop and realize that despite the hard work at hand, how actually mind blowing it is that I even exist much less have the opportunity to do work that I deeply enjoy. The fact that the trees around us are breathing in carbon and expelling oxygen for us to breath, or that someone invented barbed wire and the tools to mend it and that I can drive to almost any town and buy a perfect role of it in itself is pretty wild. The fact that I can have a personal relationship with such beautiful creatures such as our cows, and that I can help the grass grow by diverted river water to feed them, and that when time comes they will nurture us. The list could literally could go on and on infinitely.
Magic can't be rushed either. One of the natural magics I am most blown away with is the fruiting process. The mature tree who has survived and flourished starts with buds that will blossom when timing is right. Then the insects come at exactly the right moment and pollinate bringing pollen from another tree after which the flowers start their process in becoming fruits. In any stage of this process if you were to pull apart the bud there would be no flower no fruit. The fact that this whole process just happens is pretty fucking insane if you really think about it, not to mention the fact that there are infinite potentials after the fruit has been created. The magic is there, we just need to be present and patient.
The truth is that magic exists in an overflowing state around us if we see it as such. Just as easily it can become the opposite. Without the lens to see it, the magic of existence can become mundane. As I write this I am watching the sun rays move over our pasture as the cows follow to warm themselves after a cold night as they graze the freshly perked up grass. I realize that magic is a practice, and one that I hope to continue to get better at.
In a / shed dinner the magic isn’t about creating a fancy new thing, or tricking you to think anything is but what it is, it’s about putting this practice into physical form. It’s about sharing the magic we have found around us with different materials that are distinct to this terrain and our culture and sharing them with you.
