Roasted along the Way

Regular production of this newsletter was delayed over the last two weeks by the extensive preparations involved in putting together a feast for about 150 people on the occasion of my sixtieth birthday. Unbeknownst to me, my family organized a series of toasts, roasts, and performances that made this most recent party one of the more meaningful experiences in my life. My youngest child, Eli Miller-Leonard, sent the crowd into repeated paroxysms of laughter with their own original version of one of my newsletter posts. I think their roast works both as satire, and marketing -- I gained three new subscriptions in the hour following their speech! I am publishing it here because I think it is a hoot. As one of my guests asked me afterwards, “How does it feel to be so known?”  

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As I’m sure many of you know, my father has a newsletter where he posts essays concerning (mainly) Chinese history, food, the Dao, and really whatever it is he wants to write about. If you’re not already subscribed, it would be incredibly disrespectful to not subscribe right now in this moment: andrewleonard.substack.com. This is my tribute to The Cleaver and the Butterfly.

The impetus for one of my newsletter posts can be just about anything. Often there are ideas that percolate in some hidden away corner of my mind for weeks or even months before they ever take form as a draft. Bits and pieces of incremental illumination come to me each time I drop garlic into my wok and hear it sizzle, each time I translate a phrase from an ancient Chinese epic, each time I replant my scallion bulbs in the garden. Slowly, over time, these bits and pieces of story ricochet around my mind until, eureka! That’s it! That’s how it all ties together! Clarity comes and the socio-cultural-economic-imperialist-communist-historical axes all converge into one perfectly distilled piece of irregularly serialized web content.

Recently, as i was thinking about one of my planned posts, “The Dao of Finding Everything You Need in the Produce Section in an Efficient Manner,” I stopped and allowed a feeling to overcome me. An epistemological urge rose up in my belly and beckoned me to think about my own thinking. To ruminate on my tendency to ruminate. 

It should come as no surprise to any of you that I find zen in writing these posts. Pure freedom of expression can be hard to come by in the art-for-profit capitalist society to which we are all doomed to labor under. Wu Gang, the Chinese Sisyphus, looks down at us from the moon and says “those unfortunate souls” before taking up his ax and once more cutting down the ever-regrowing osmanthus tree.

So there I was, sitting at my lectern, translating character by character as the Warriors played in the background when I had the epiphanous moment. Everything is perfectly tied together. The Dao is not only found in food, in weeding the garden, in a free flowing 5-man offense. The Dao is in the Dao of being in those things. I found the zen of finding the zen in the ways I try to align my life with the zen. And the more I thought about it the more it fell into place. The formula to these posts is that there is no formula. Sure I might start with an evocative image of my daily life, transition into a philosophical exploration of the Dao, name drop Laozi and Zhuangzi at least three times, and sprinkle in bits of a recipe throughout, but in doing so I allow myself to go on whatever extended tangents arise. I have the freedom to break the formula wherever I wish, the freedom to go where I want to go, explore what I want to explore. It is not me who finds the story that I want to write; it is the story itself that arrives on my doorstep and says “I want to be written!”

Is it not the true Way to find the Way by not looking for the Way, only to then find the Way while reflecting on what it means to not look for the Way and then finding the Way in all the things you did along the Way?

Enlightenment is found only by arranging your life in such a way that you might find it. As it is written in the Dao De Jing, “Where there is music and food, travelers stop.”