Edoardo Ballerini

The last growth spurt of my life happened when I was 26 years old.  I ate and slept like a teenager, and for a few short weeks a typical evening was spent consuming a pound of pasta and a box of donuts, and then crashing for about half a day.  I didn’t even gain any weight.  It all got magically burned off into… growth.  Maybe I got a little taller, I don’t know.  One thing I did notice, however, was that my brain “fizzed,” as if somebody had poured champagne on it.

I’m told this has to do with the brain “re-wiring.”  That is, that the brain is being asked to do things it’s not accustomed to and needs to put the threads together differently.  This, evidently, leads to the bubbly sensation.  And as I reflect back on that period it was also the beginning of a creative, artistic and personal growth spurt.  A lot happened in the coming years, I blossomed and grew, and it’s very likely that I was suddenly thinking differently.

Alas, though, somewhere along the way, I got dull, and there was neither hunger nor fizz.  There was, in fact, little feeling at all.  I could have walked through a plate glass window and barely felt the effects.  (Judging from a couple of scars on my my thigh that I cannot account for, I may have done just that.)

But this New Year’s Eve I was suddenly ravenously hungry once again, as I remember being those many years ago.  The hunger has stayed with me for three days without pause.  Every few hours or so I’ve wanted to find the nearest Bacchanalian feast and eat a wild boar while washing it down with a gourd of wine or three.  And along with it has come the fizzing sensation.

I have no idea what’s going on, but I’m convinced it’s the cumulative effect of meditation and so many books challenging my assumptions and ways.  Either way, I’m choosing to think of this new-found hunger as a metaphor.  So… let it be indicative of the year to come.  Let the hunger continue throughout the coming months.  May my body grumble at me continuously, urging me to feed it, with foods, with thoughts, with ideas, with passion, with the knowable and the unknowable, the known and the unknown.

Let the hunger never cease, may my brain always bubble…

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.