Spicy Spirits

The first time I ever had real Spanish food in New Mexico, the food the rest of the world calls Mexican but is actually a combination of Native and Spanish cuisine relying heavily on chile peppers, I thought I was going to explode. Never in my life had I had food so hot, food that touched my tongue and blew off the top of my head. It made Bugs Bunny and all those other cartoons from my childhood look like they had come to life.

New Mexican food is like nowhere else in the world. The way the Spanish, the descendants of the original Spaniards to New Mexico from the 1500’s, cook is unlike anything else you will ever taste. The closest I found to it was in restaurants run by families from the state of Chihuahua, the Mexican state just south of New Mexico. Even the food in Chicago restaurants owned by families from the state of Michoacan was not as spicy.

If we want real spirituality, we have to be like the Spanish food of New Mexico. We need the weight, the meatiness, of really having guts. We need the spiritual equivalents of squash, corn and beans — the three sisters — for our spiritual nutrients. We must leaven out our lives with our spiritual tortillas and rice, with the basics of life to feed our souls.

And we need spiritual spiciness. Relying on the same old thing day after day, century after century, is not enough. Sooner or later, all spices go flat. That’s why we need to get fresh spices from our gardens and the stores.

The same goes true with our spirituality. If all I did at age twenty is what I did at age ten, I remained a spiritual child. I failed to grow up. The same thing is true every day of my life. If I don’t throw some spiritual salt in my daily life, I’ll go flat. I need to constantly grow, change, do something new and different.

The big exciting new object for my day may be something as simple as walking someplace I don’t normally walk. I could listen to some music or read something new. Something that is entirely fresh and different in my life.

Adding a little spice or even some hot chile peppers isn’t always enough.

There are times when I need Christmas.

Christmas isn’t what you think unless you know the New Mexican meaning. Christmas is more than biscochitos and burritos. Christmas is a New Mexico invention unlike anything you might have imaged.

Traditionally people put either red or green chile sauce on their food. Whatever it was. Enchiladas, tacos, burritos. Until one day someone changed the game of life.

They put red chile sauce on one side of the food and green chile sauce on the other side. And there you have it. Christmas.

Depending on where you are, red is hotter than green or green is hotter than red. In my book, they’re both obscenely hot. But they do what they are supposed to do.

They change up our ordinary lives. They put heat in our days.

New heat in our souls brings new ideas. Fresh ideas. Fresh challenges.

You’re not going to put red or green chile salsa on an apple empanada, but that sweet treat could be the thing that changes your life. A coworker made biscochitos that I found to be life changing. He followed his mother’s recipe. Whatever her family had done, they took apart what was normal in that Spanish Christmastime cookie and brought it to new heights.

That’s why putting spice into our spirits does for us. It doesn’t matter if it’s Thanksgiving, Christmas or the day we forgot to do something our kids asked us to do. It doesn’t matter.

It does matter if we get gutsy. It matters when we step outside of the old way of doing things and challenge ourselves in new ways. Maybe red, green and Christmas salsas are all too strong for my palate.

But is my spiritual palate strong enough? That’s where spice truly enters our lives.

It’s not enough for the Creator if I am who you want me to be. It’s not even a start. My job is to step up and do my job. Regardless of who or what other people think I have been, who I am now or who they want me to be in the future. A very long time ago Someone told me what to do. I was told that there would always be support and protection for me because that’s what angels do. They support and protect our souls.

Yes, the physical world around us is a conundrum. No, people don’t make sense. Including us. We don’t make sense.

That’s fine. Just pick up that spiritual salt and taste it. Add some flavor to your life.

We deserve to have spicy spirits. To be the us we were created to be.