I’ve mentioned it before, but I just have to do it again. Watch Street Food: Latin America (Netflix), if you need a good relaxing, heartwarming, reassuring, resonating show to watch before you go to bed at night. To be clear, I don’t really like to cook. I am not a particularly picky or discriminating eater. I don’t watch The Food Channel. I love to watch Street Food: Latin America for one major reason – the cooks in the show are absolutely passionate about what they do. They love their individual lives, each centered around cooking, and it glows out of their eyes and their whole faces beam and shine. You can’t help but feel warmed and touched by these chefs’ bursting bliss. Their happiness and contentment honestly seems to burst right out of them, like it can’t be contained in their bodies. Just like daily cooking and serving makes these cooks, in the show, buzz with delight, (and like eating their various concoctions does for their customers), I feel a complete and wholesome sensation of well-being, watching “love of life” in action. It is so utterly inspirational and uplifting.
None of the featured chefs in these shows are wealthy. In fact most of them live quite modest lives, and some of them created their shops and their street stalls out of total desperation, needing to save their families from starvation. Still, if you asked me to give you an example of a completely happy, satisfied, and totally alive person, I could quickly pick more than one of these street vendors from this delightful show, as a perfect, shining example. Honestly, it would be easier for me to show you one of these people, than most comfortable American suburbanites whom I know.
This show reminds us that real nourishment comes from living our passions. When we do this, we feed our own souls, and the by-product of being true to our own purposes and to own our selves, is that the souls of many other people are fed, as well. We are all inspired and nourished, by art, and by music, and by brilliant scientific discoveries, and by inventions, and by well-cared for, happy children, and by people who serve simple, delicious delicacies, from their well-loved stalls and carts (and hearts), every single day. We are inspired and comforted and blessed by others who are the embodiment of Love in motion. Love is an action. Our hunger and thirst for life is satiated by what we do, and what others do, all in the name of Love. Life flows so well that way, just like it was designed and intended to do.
