just add salt

Gather around your light and listen to these stories. 

Come closer to the sounds, and hear what tales there are to tell.  Learn from the stories, all you can about salt.  Memories of pink, Himalayan salt.  Dreams of Vietnamese salt farms; next to visions of naps in hammocks, after watching the sea water evaporate.  Journeys for salt.  Killer salt, helpful salt, indifferent salt, arrogant salt.  Peculiar compound that we love.

Once upon a time there was a salt farm in Viet Nam.  Seven people are napping in the hammocks after a delicious lunch of sea food with rice wine.  The radio is on, but no one listens to the man who is talking about the weather.  Everyone knows it is hot, and even the sun is tired.

From the kitchen, a small child watches as two slugs and a snail get covered over by a mountain of salt, and as their bodies evaporate, they transition, by osmosis into nothingness.  Except that it’s not nothing, thinks the small child who is watching, because nothing can be nothing.  It’s just something else now, some other matter that we don’t have the name for.  The child sweeps it up from the floor and returns to the tasks in the kitchen.

Just add salt.

Further away, on a snow covered mountain with a lake view, the salt is used to change the snow into water, and this makes the onlookers smile.  Is it magic?  No, just physics, and how easy it is to dilute the snow when you know how. 

Evil salt, helpful salt, kind salt and gentle salt.  Friend of tequila, enemy of thine mind.

Back to the sea, and the first thing the two swimmers notice is the smell of salt.  The blue of memory relaxes the mind, and the colours whisper again “you have been here before”.  The good sea air, and the views of the horizon are what we love so much.  Is it the sound of the never ending waves, or the rhythm that helps us breathe well?  Is it the wind on our faces, or the smiles from the other swimmers that encourage us to say to strangers, “here is the sea for you, it welcomes you”.

Unlike Lot’s wife, we crave more of it. 

We need the crystalline mineral to preserve our food, and our memories; carefully covered in bees wax wraps, and hidden at the bottom of a cupboard.  One day we’ll see a seahorse, and when we do, we’ll lean in closer and ask him “do you love the full moons, the smell of summer, or the taste of salt best?”

We’ll wait in the quiet for him to answer.