Holy and Human
If I must eat, let me feast on beauty first.
We often approach spirituality as an exercise in deletion. Strip away desire. Shave the head. Wear the robe. Deny the body. Maintain a serene, untouchable exterior. As if holiness were something you could arrive at by subtraction.
But the longer I spend in temples, and in the world outside them, the more I understand: spirit is not an escape from humanity. It is the deep, unconditional embrace of it.
When I first arrived at Sitagu, I asked the old monk whether the mind would eventually stop if we practiced meditation daily. He said, oh no. The mind will always do what it wants. But you will be the one changed, no longer believing your thoughts.
Hungerless
Why do people have to eat
When life is rinse, repeat?
I bought this food to stare instead,
Not bring another bite to bed.
A banana curved in yellow light,
A mango cup glowing bright,
Beneath the tree they softly lay,
Like little suns that lit my day.
Maybe there’s no hunger in me.
Maybe beauty is enough to see.
If I could sit and simply look,
I’d feast more deeply than the cook.
The funny thing about the food is, I genuinely bought it to eat. Doctor’s orders: log some real calories.
Yet somewhere between styling the banana beneath the tree and watching the afternoon light fall across its golden skin, my experience shifted. The mundane requirement of eating transformed, once again, into something else entirely. Into pure admiring.
Much of human life is automatic repetition. We eat, work, scroll, rush, sleep, and perform the same rituals every day simply because that is what human beings do. But mindfulness acts as a wedge. It interrupts the motion long enough to ask one simple, radical question: Do I actually want this right now?
In that moment, the answer was no. My eyes had already feasted. I grabbed a candy bar instead, to fuel the body so it could rinse, repeat, and live again tomorrow.
While living at the monastery, I jokingly told my sister I was heading to the grocery store for some “Breatharian Treats.” She laughed out loud at the irony. I smiled and said: If I must eat.
We place spiritual seekers on impossible pedestals, demanding they transcend the very earth they walk on. But when you look closely, the divine is always mixing with our beautifully flawed realities.
My father told me about monks in Nanhai who ate strict vegetarian meals at the temple, then slipped into town for meat, simply because it wasn’t offered inside. In Japan, I met monks carrying the latest iPhones, scrolling social media, listening to rock music. In the Philippines, a monk of considerable personal wealth asked for donations without shame, framing it as an opportunity for good karma.
To a rigid mind, these look like contradictions. To a seeking soul, this is the ultimate beauty of being human. It is not about what a doctrine permits, or what your palm lines predict. It is about learning to honor yourself fully, exactly as you are in this moment.
I think of kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold. The cracks are not hidden. They are illuminated. And somehow the mended bowl becomes more precious than one that was never broken at all.
We are all mended bowls.
When we stop condemning our own contradictions, something quietly opens. We stop waiting to be worthy. We meet each moment without the gavel of judgment, and find the sacred not in a pristine, holy temple, but right here, in the messy, luminous chaos of an ordinary life. Taking out the trash. Eating junk food. Getting annoyed at the slow cashier.
This is the practice. Not transcendence. Presence.
As Bob Ross once said about painting: “Ever make mistakes in life? Let’s make them birds. Yeah, they’re birds now.”