Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his small, luminous Letters to a Young Poet:

“If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches.”

Whether one is rich or poor in money, life offers its riches without discrimination. Most of these riches arrive in the form of relationships.

We often speak of “relationship” as if it belongs only to people — family, friends, the dear and near, perhaps a beloved pet. But life is far more promiscuous in its affections. It binds us to everything.

Life is a paradox — an abstraction vast as the sky with its never‑ending horizons, yet made of the most concrete, phenomenal things. It is the air that enters as breath and leaves us every moment. The water that quenches the thirst of our cells. The food that fills our plate and nourishes our body. The clothes that hold our scent and our modesty. The shelter that keeps our dreams intact, even if the sky were to fall. The books that carry other minds into ours, almost like osmosis. The music that rearranges our heartbeat — sometimes faster, sometimes slower. The football match that turns strangers into a single roar, especially when divine beings like Leo, Maradona, Zico, or Socrates appear on the ground. The flowers, leaves, trees, birds, clouds, sun, moon. The vehicles and gadgets that extend our reach. The deaf and mute gods we pray to, the dogs who love us without condition, the work that shapes our days.

Life is all of these and more. In the last three years at the Zendo, learning with a Zen Master, one lesson has stayed with me: enlightenment is nothing more than living each moment fully, with awareness and compassion. Spirituality is nothing more than being a humane human. It has nothing to do with divinity, nor with gods and heaven.

Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself.”

To live is to be related to all these — to be in conversation with the constituents of existence. The quality of our life depends not only on the spread of these relationships, but on their depth.

When we speak of these parts, we are, in a way, reducing the great, whole abstraction of life into pieces we can hold, taste, and turn over in our hands. It is like having both a spotlight and a panoramic view — the detail and the whole. Trouble comes when we get stuck in one: the spotlight shrinking into a microscope, or stretching into a telescope that pushes life far away. Or a panoramic view so blurred it loses meaning.

As a child, my world was fourfold: Food. Football. Books. Politics. I did not choose them; they chose me. They rose from the environment into which I was born and shaped my early years. Much later, Zen — and to an extent, music — joined the list. But those originals never left me. They were not hobbies. They were my first teachers in the art of being alive — nourishing the body, stirring the spirit, feeding the mind.

Even now, I see life as a web of relationships — each thread a chance to meet the world more fully, each knot a reminder that nothing exists alone. And nowhere is this web more deliciously visible than in an Onam Sadya.

The Sadya is not merely another lunch. It is a parliament of colours, aromas, and textures convened on a single green leaf, democratically served — the ultimate gastronomical delight. Onto that green plantain leaf arrive the emissaries of the season: the crisp pappadam that shatters like laughter, the avial — a chorus of vegetables bound in coconut and curd, the olan, pale and quiet, like a monk in white robes, the fiery kalan that speaks in exclamation marks, the tangy puli inji — my favourite.

Rice — often Palakkadan par‑boiled matta rice with its brownish hues — sits at the centre, as if holding court, receiving in turn the sambar’s earthy embrace, the rasam’s sharp, peppered counsel, and finally, the sweet benediction of payasam — four types of it, each to be savoured in a particular order lest the last lose its distinct memory.

To eat a Sadya is to be in relationship with more than food. It is to shake hands with the farmers who grew the rice, and the cooks who lovingly prepared each dish. To nod to the coconut trees swaying in the Malabar wind. To remember the grandmother who taught you how to fold the leaf just so. To sit in the company of kin and strangers, all bound by the same choreography of reaching, serving, tasting, smiling.

Even at SATORP — the greenfield refinery of Aramco and Total in Al Khobar — our project site mess offered dozens of cuisines to cater to the sixty or seventy nationalities working there, the largest spread I’d ever seen. Yet even that came a distant second to an Onam Sadya. In recent years, Thara and I made it a point to attend every major Sadya event in Bangalore. We were even the first to arrive at the Kappa Chakka Kandhari fest in Koramangala.

This year, I’m at Kanzeon Zendo. After checking around, I settled on the Onam Sadya at the Kodaikanal International Hotel — good food, fair prices, and staff who know both Fr. AMA and our Zendo Manager, Prakash Raj. They always treat us warmly.

On Thiruvonam day, we arrived early at 11:30 a.m., only to be told the feast would be ready at 12:30. We decided to wait over coffee, but soon the manager informed us it would be delayed further. So we ordered à la carte instead. The food was delicious — no doubt about that — but knowing a Sadya was being prepared next door and that we’d miss it was a small dampener.

Prakash was apologetic, and we planned to return the next day for the Sadya. But as we were paying, we learned it was being served only that day. Strangely, I felt no disappointment. I simply accepted it — not with resignation, but with the quiet ease that comes when the craving has dissolved.

Back at the Zendo, I called Thara. In her school  The Valley School  for lunch, they’d prepared Kerala‑style curries — my favourites. We laughed over my “missed Sadya” story. My own equanimity surprised me. Once, Thara and I had driven all the way from Kanakapura Road to Murugan Idli which is almost near Krishnagiri at around 70 + kms from our home, for a plate of podi idli. That was my past. Now, I find myself more willing to let life unfold as it will.

Yesterday’s koan at Dokusan was Hekiganroku 58, Joshu’s Pitfall: “The supreme way is not difficult; it just dislikes picking and choosing.” Once we stop that, life is wonderful. A parotta with Chettinad chicken curry is as delicious as avial with puli inji.

Jiddu Krishnamurti more than once said:

“I don’t mind what happens. That is the essence of inner freedom. It is a timeless spiritual path: release attachment to outcomes, and deep inside yourself, you will feel good no matter what.”

I think I realise what he meant: inner freedom is not minding what happens.

For this year’s Thiruvonam, I did not sit before the leaf. But the relationship was still there — in the remembering, in the imagining, in the gratitude for what could have been. A thread loosened, perhaps, but not broken. For in the web of relationships, even absence can be a form of presence.