Last year my wife bought me the perfect birthday present – or, at any rate, the perfect birthday present for a coffee snob. The gift in question was my very own espresso machine. Ever since, I’ve made it part of my daily routine, immediately after giving our son his breakfast, to make myself a doppio (a double espresso), which, like the Italians, I drink without the addition of milk but, unlike the Italians, I also take without sugar. I then sit myself down, perhaps on the deck, and have my coffee moment. This five minutes of time and space has become one of the highlights of my day. A five minutes set apart. A sacred space. I don’t fill it with anything in particular, not idle thoughts nor prayers. In fact, I try to keep it empty. I watch the birds at our feeder (indigo buntings and cardinals ablaze with beauty; wrens warbling with liquid loquaciousness; titmice and chickadees) or watch our rooster strutting his stuff on the grass below, surrounded by his harem of hens.
I try not to fill the five minutes with anything because I want to leave room for it to be filled with the beauty of the moment. Nature dislikes a vacuum and will fill the vacant space with its own inimitable presence if we let it and don’t drown it out with our own distractions.
And this is one of the tragedies of our age. Everyone is busy drowning out the presence of the beauty that surrounds them, cramming the moment with “stuff”. At the gym, everyone is wired for sound, ensuring that there’s not a solitary moment in which to think about anything in particular. And that appears to be the point. Modern man drowns out any possibility of dwelling upon the point of anything in order to avoid the dreadful possibility that there is no point. If relativism points to pointlessness, what’s the point of thinking about it? The paradox is that there’s less of any substance in their moments crammed to the brim with the “stuff” that smothers existence than there is in the emptiness of the moment filled with the beauty of silence.
If man stopped trying to avoid the point he might actually see it. If he stopped moving for a moment he would be moved by the moment. If he stopped stimulating himself with stupefying sensation, he would rediscover his true senses.
This is the beauty of the Coffee Moment.
And in this little blurb you get to the heart of the wisdom of the Desert Fathers: silence of any kind is a living hell for the human heart. However, those moments filled with eternity are the very things that help to give us peace.
Good post!
Might I recommend New Mexico Pinon Coffee from Trader Joe’s? Its quite tasty, to make a collosal understatement.
Being an ethnic Italian (actually I was born in Italy but my parents immigrated when I was a small child) I agree with you that there are few pleasures as a good cup of espresso. But I do need to have some sugar with it. I enjoy such sacred moments as well.