Dreaming About Sushi

David Hockney, Self Portrait, In His Studio, 2010

I recently learned about Jiro Ono, a Japanese sushi chef, aged ninety-four, who is still “making sushi, better and ever better sushi.” Making sushi has “been his life’s work and sole ambition.” He “still continues to pursue perfection in the preparation and presentation of raw fish. He dreams about sushi, and said that he would like to die making it.”

We learn about Ono from David Hockney’s new biography, where Hockney, in his eighties, adds this: “I have to paint. I’ve always wanted to paint; I’ve always wanted to make pictures from when I was tiny. That’s my job I think, making pictures, and I’ve gone on doing it for over sixty years. I’m still doing it, and I think they are still interesting as well. The world is very, very beautiful if you look at it, but most people don’t look very much, with an intensity, do they? I do.”

Don’t we all have something like making sushi in our lives? Or making pictures? Maybe it’s our daily work, or maybe it’s something running parallel to our work? Whatever it is, you find yourself saying: I have to find time for doing this, maybe it’s sushi, or writing, making music, making beautiful films, creating beauty for your home, growing flowers. Maybe it’s making beautiful meals for your family.

Though Eugene Peterson was a devoted senior pastor of a church for thirty years, he knew, all along the way, he was a writer. In Winn Collier’s marvelous recent biography of Peterson, appropriately titled A Burning In My Bones, we learn that Peterson was drawn into a deep practice of daily prayer, always seeking to be shaped by a biblical imagination—and yet, somehow all of these things merged, mysteriously, with a compelling need to write: “I must write,” Peterson says without hesitation, “writing is my vocation. . . . Just stop whatever I am doing and write myself into being. . . . My anchor to my soul and my God is in this pen.”

The great Robert Frost says that writing

begins in delight and ends in wisdom . . . in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

Delight, maybe wisdom, clarification, but surely some stay against all the confusion inevitably swirling about—isn’t this why we follow these passions?  

I remember the many years, rising very early, journal notebook in hand, sometimes next to a morning fire in the fireplace, fresh coffee nearby, putting words onto the page, words on words, lines of words, listening for the rhythms, the beat, tasting the sounds, trying to nudge myself out of the flatness of life, trying to cross that threshold into clarity, trying to touch the nerve of that holy thump at the very heart of living, catching occasionally that glimmer, off to the side, of beauty, to be lifted, if just for a moment, out of the ordinary, into the holy, through words.  

This for me has been what Peterson calls that “old familiar scent,” an enduring passion to find words that come close to right, a scent that has drawn me through the zig-zags of various kinds of work. It is as if, through it all, this was part of the “burning in my bones.”

In his deservedly famous letters to a young poet, the younger man writing to the revered poet, longing to know how to follow his passion to become a poet, asking whether he has a chance to be successful, Rainer Maria Rilke counsels:

Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything.

For those who follow a passion, which is most of us, I think God calls us into this patience, this waiting, looking, listening. To follow this call, I believe, is to be filled with joy, to trust, against the odds, that summer will come. We just have to keep putting those words down, finding the right brush stroke, morning after morning, the coffee nearby. When we follow this call, whatever the costs, just maybe, we come closer to the heart of God.