Pungent sage is smoking on my table, ash crumbling into the bowl I’ve placed it in. I like to watch smoke rise and billow. Smoke paints the shape of the air, how it moves in waves, shifting, mercurial.  Knowing that oxygen and nitrogen are ever weaving unseen around us. Have you ever seen dried leaves in a parking lot skip and spin on a dervish of wind? Like a mini tornado. All the result of the sun heating and cooling the Earth's surface. Sunshine, moonshine. Breeze and billow.

Magic lives in mundane places, just under the skin of the known. In the place between waking and dreaming. In stillness. In the space between thought and no-thought. Pure awareness. That’s where beauty breeds, or the consciousness of it at least. Where we can see the suchness of a thing, the something more. The energy imbuing things, you might say. The potential.

So the smoke is not just smoke. It’s a poem, curling unknown scripts in the air. The whirlwind of leaves is a dance.

I like to live quietly in awe of the nature of things. I find life ecstatic and fulfilling and painful and intense. That’s the gift and curse of life, the flood of emotions, the gorgeous & terrible drama. The glass coupe that holds your lovely fizzing drink can slip, break, and cut. Even a charmed life holds within it heartbreak, injustice, and death (inevitably).

So I set myself to work that offers me a window to see life as illuminated, expansive, infinite. Not to escape. But to enliven my experience with as much wonder as possible.

I photograph the flower. I write the sunset. I eat the cookie.

I love the flower. I love the sunset. I love the cookie.

I love the moment.

I love.

That’s the result of all of this presence business, anyway. You fall in love with everything.

And now I’m going to be really awkward about a segway into these truffles.

They’re simple, easy-to-make, and delicious. Toasting the cashews gives them a depth of flavor. Paired with vanilla and maple syrup, they’re totally enthralling. Dipped in chocolate… let’s be real, everything is better dipped in chocolate.

I got the idea for these toasted cashew butter truffles whilst in the process of making my turmeric chocolate chip cashew butter cookies. The wet mix in the cookies (mostly toasted cashew butter, coconut oil, maple syrup, vanilla) was so good that I was having a hard time keeping myself from eating it. Lest the cookies be ruined.

So after Logan and I scarfed all of those cookies, I whipped these truffle babes right up. Toasted cashew butter is the shit. I don’t know why I haven’t made it more often. Plus eating anything that reminds me of moon phases makes me feel like a green witch. Like maybe I make my own tinctures from wildcrafted yarrow or something (I don't). There's something magical about it.

I’ve been keeping these cashew butter truffles around as a quick dessert (and anytime snack). I have them in my freezer right now. I reach in and grab a couple anytime a sweet craving hits. For me that’s every day around 4 and 9pm.

Just to emphasize, these are so delicious I was tempted to keep them all to myself. Except that I’m really bad at keeping secrets. And I wanted to show off. As soon as Logan tried them that was it. We finished them all off that afternoon.

It would be a bummer if they weren’t so damn easy to make.