Between Land and Sea
COLLISION 00014
As skeptical as I was of AI’s recommendation to read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, 12,000+ positive human reviews encouraged me to take the leap of faith.
I was instantly swept up in Kimmerer’s point of view which weaves her scientific knowledge as a botanist and ecology professor with her spiritual beliefs and practices as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Kimmerer’s words opened my mind for the first time to the often overlooked and simply magical relationship plants have to each other, the land and our human existence. In exploring this tension between two seemingly disparate worlds, she connects dots that everyday living and modern lifestyles can gloss past and recklessly over.
I had chosen the book in a concerted effort to shift out of the heavier stories of triumph and failure found in the memoirs of Maya Angelou and Nelson Mandela, the headier, over my head achievements found in Walter Isaacson’s Albert Einstein biography and the gastronomic obsession found in the poetic musings of the one and only Julia Child. I didn’t want lighter reading necessarily. I wanted instead to discover a new lens from which to filter the meaning traveling with intent and writing about intentional travel had inspired within me.
It’s fair to say I got that and then some.
The parallels that existed between Kimmerer’s soulful metaphors of reciprocity, gratitude and existence and Travel’s transformative power energized and animated what I once thought was all but impossible. They enabled an even deeper relationship with curiosity, beauty and self-discovery. They brought even more meaning to movement and collision.
I was still reading Braiding Sweetgrass when I sat down at Seebamboes, a Cape Town restaurant I had booked in the weeks leading up to my first visit to South Africa. Seebamboes’ concept was a most unusual take on traditional surf and turf. It creatively explored connections found among the local ingredients of the Cape’s land and sea. And not just any local ingredients. Its marine vegetation.
I wasn’t even halfway through my first dish when a card on the table caught my eye. Plant by plant, it detailed what would show up on my plate here in ways that were mind-blowing, flavorful riffs on both the familiar and the unconventional.
There would be nibs and tastes in some iteration or another of the big, gnarly, ominous sea bamboos that washed ashore with stalks as thick as a fireman’s hose, which time and tide had uprooted from the coast’s giant sea forests. There would be broths, stews, even ice cream made from the sea’s Duinespinasie (dune spinach) and Duineselderei (dune celery).
When I first tried to make my reservation, Seebamboes was closed for holiday. But I stayed on it and persisted in booking my coveted spot in the 16-seater restaurant. The very night I was scheduled to dine, South Africa’s June 30 immigration protests shut down the restaurant as a precaution. Fate eventually got me in two nights later, on my last evening in Cape Town. A special wine collaboration dinner. A single table left.
And that is how I came to dine, forty-eight hours later, with an enhanced perspective that could have been gleaned only from a tour around the Cape of Good Hope. I had driven past the kelp forests where My Octopus Teacher was filmed, experienced a local fish market and penguin colony and soaked up the awe of a journey to and from the most southwestern tip of this magnificent continent. The delay had groomed and readied me.
Wanting to keep the collision alive, I felt pulled to tell one of the restaurant’s founders about Braiding Sweetgrass. While she hadn’t heard of the book, she immediately recognized the significance of what I was sharing.
What I had been hungry for in mind, body, gut and soul was laid out before me now to take in with all of my senses. But it was taste that carried the meaning to a sacred place deep inside.
The connections between land and sea truly are as infinite it seemed as they are delicious.
