“To eat beautifully is to live well.”
- John Zacarias
One look at this photo and you can see this is not an ordinary table. If you have an eye for Japanese aesthetics, and a love of deliberate simplicity, you may be drawn, as I am, to this ritualistic scene. It is a table set with intention. Ingredients picked from Georgia's Abiquiu garden, cooked with thoughtfulness and care, and plated with beauty in mind.
“Food served in the O'Keeffe household was always nutritious, tasty, and simply but beautifully presented,” Margaret Wood wrote in the introduction to her cookbook, A Painter's Kitchen: Recipes from the Kitchen of Georgia O'Keeffe. “Miss O'Keeffe often wondered aloud, 'Do you think other people eat as well as we do?'” (Read the full NYT article by Rachel Syme.)
What draws me most to this image of Georgia O'Keefe at her dining room table is that the table is an altar of an appreciation for the everyday art of eating. It's a place where the love of food becomes a form of devotion, and where nourishment becomes an offering and an expression of art. Georgia clearly understood that the way we feed ourselves shapes the way we move through the world, and the importance of embodying our art, in both ordinary and extraordinary forms.
In my own practice, whether it's making something good to eat in the kitchen or painting an enso with Japanese ink in my studio, I abide by the same truth. Beauty is what we make of our lives when we slow down enough to notice, to create it with care and attention, even in the most mundane ways. A table set with intention becomes a small sanctuary. A meal cooked with care and consideration becomes a mis en place meditation. In the midst of all our busyness, these small rituals can ground and guide us back to ourselves. They remind us of the simple beauty that is before us, that we can create, when we take time to thoughtfully consider what it can be and how we can bring that in our everyday lives. Eating well as a ritual is the easiest way we can bring that artful intention into our lives everyday.
May your table be a place where you can pause to savor, and remember, the art of your own life.
X Alisa
Photo credit: Georgia O'keefe, Abiquiu ranch, New Mexico , second photo by Tony Vaccaro