Why I Stir the Pot
The first time I saw a fiddlehead fern, it was coiled in a shallow wooden bowl at the Union Square farmers market in New York City—tight as a question mark, green as new beginnings. I didn’t know what it was or how to cook it. I only knew I was drawn to it. There’s something ancient in its shape, something secret in the spiral. I brought a handful home, not because I had a plan, but because I had a feeling.
That’s how most of my alchemy begins—with a flicker of curiosity, a nudge from something half-remembered, half-arriving from the future. A scent. A story. A sacred ingredient. I stir the pot because the mystery is meant to be touched, tasted, and teased into form. I stir because the spiral teaches me that revelation is slow, sacred, and never linear.
This space—The Hidden Alchemist—exists for those moments—the ones where something small and strange pulls us toward meaning—like “The Rudolph Egg,” a story I shared with readers not long ago, in which we uncovered the secret together.
Long before flowering plants existed, ferns filled prehistoric forests, uncurling their fiddleheads and rising to meet the sun. They reproduce through spores, not seeds or flowers—an ancient, nearly invisible process. Dreamlike in its delicacy and mystery.
Today, cultural memes reproduce at lightning speed, flying across the globe via electricity. But it often feels less like a spiral of shared meaning and more like a lash against the curious, the creative, the nonconformist.
This is why I stir the pot.
More than culinary curiosity, the fiddlehead fern is a spiral of deep time—a whisper from Earth’s early memory. The Italian painter and writer Carlo Levi once wrote “The future has an ancient heart.” I believe that is true. And every day, truth unfurls like a fiddlehead’s frond. Our thoughts create our realities.
We are a courageous community—rooted in wonder, stirred by longing, willing to look closer.
What are we creating through our artistic expression, and why and how does it nourish the soul? Uncovering what appears at first to be hidden is an exciting journey we can undertake together.
I welcome you to The Hidden Alchemist, where spirit, memory, food, and culture converge—creating infinite questions and possibilities through writing and the arts.
Here, what’s hidden reveals itself, one spiral at a time.