I am sitting on my screen porch in the Love & Relationships bagua of my house eating Liangfen. Called “Rice Bean Jello” on the menu, it is a bowl of delicate, translucent noodles served with cilantro and chili oil; a Sichuan dish sometimes called “heartbreaking jelly noodles.”
If you feel sad or heartbreaking, go and taste it,
then your sadness will go with the wind
since it is too spicy, so that
all the feeling you have is a spicy taste.
I ordered Liangfen for just this moment — Sunday lunch on my screen porch and quiet meditations on Love & Relationships — part of a mindful evaluation process a friend and I are working through this fall.
It is not surprising to me that the Love & Relationships bagua of my home — the far right corner of the nine-squared feng shui map — is a screen porch. A place where seasons come and go, where winds shift and conditions often change.
And so, the Liangfen and its intention to chase away sadness are good company as I take inventory of Love & Relationships, and honor all of the changes that line up in multiple columns on what I call my Loss List.
If I were more inspired, the Loss List could probably be one of those fancy word clouds, but for now it’s just a long list; the friends, clients, loves, acquaintances, advisors, and communities to which I am no longer attached. The people and places no longer part of my present — or my future.
Sometimes, I want to point fingers, blame the pandemic, firmer boundaries, age and natural attrition, poor choices, humans. Other times, I just want someone to validate the losses with a giant YES stamp, I GET IT.
This is grief of course — heavy, messy, capricious GRIEF that breezes in and out of my days like the unpredictable breezes from Long Island Sound.
And there’s a lot of it — like climate changing levels of grief. The kind that shifts the ground, floods your reserves, erodes hope. Or…maybe it’s the kind that burns off the detritus in a blazing firestorm to eventually become beautiful new growth?
But I’m not there yet.
Today, I’m sitting on my screen porch enjoying the first chilly afternoon of fall, there’s a hawk bearing witness to my tears, the cause of which is only this bowl of Liangfen — just heartbreakingly spicy enough for a quiet reckoning.
Essay ©2023, Jen Payne. Click here to read more from Jen. Click here for more on Liangfen from China Sichuan Food.
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2 replies on “Eating Liangfen in the Love & Relationships Bagua”
You have captured my mood although I am living on the Texas Gulf Coast, re-reading the book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May for the third time. The first chapter is September, and I read it during the month of September, reading the pithy passages over and over until October first when I begin the second chapter, October. This book would be better where there were real seasons, unlike the summer and winter here.
Thanks for the experience of reading this.
Hi Rae. Thank you for your comment AND the book referral. I’ve been looking for something like that! Hope you are doing well! xoxo