Day 21. Feast for the Eyes
Putting our attention on our sense of TASTE
Hi all,
I was so moved by everyone’s 2025 hopeful color palettes yesterday. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the community chat and see the thousands of wonderful drawings people are creating, this is a great day to do it. Such a simple attention exercise around sight can create such sweet and profound outcomes.
Today seems like a good day to have a little fun. To do something tasty.
So let’s turn our attention to our sense of TASTE.
TASTE: Focus on Cooking & Drawing
If you know my work, you probably know I had the joy of collaborating with author and chef Samin Nosrat on Salt Fat Acid Heat. It was a joy, despite the fun fact that I had zero idea how to cook when we first began. Samin and I worked together for years. As she cooked, I drew over her shoulder. Through proximity I learned not only how to cook (and what a phenomenal teacher Samin is), but also how much drawing and cooking have in common. If I were to summarize it into four statements…
Do it with love. Learn by doing. Make mistakes. Fail Bravely.
Let me (and Julia Child) explain.
Do it with Love. You’ve probably heard the expression “cook with love.” When people cook with love and care, we taste it in the food they make. (And we can taste it when people don’t!) The same goes for drawing. When people make a drawing (or painting or any art really) with love and care and delight, we can FEEL it. The energy we put in = the energy that comes out.
Learn by doing! Make Mistakes! It’s the same as drawing as it is with cooking. But why listen to me talk about this when you could watch Julia Child demonstrate:
As she says after she botches the potato flip:
“The only way you learn how to flip things is just to flip them.”
As in drawing: The only way to learn to draw is to draw.
On mistakes in cooking:
“Anytime anything like this happens, you haven’t lost anything because you can always turn this into something else.”
As in drawing: We can always turn drawing mistakes into something else.
Have the courage to make mistakes, to turn them into something else, to not take ourselves so seriously. And just to DO IT.
Fail Bravely! Failing is the only way to learn. Here is more Julia on the fear of failure: