When it comes to cooked food, I like
mine spicy with an assortment of hot peppers (scotch bonnet pepper is a MUST).
They’ve been a part of my meals since I was at least 9-years-old.
I have a hard time eating cooked food
that's mild; not because it tastes bad. The food just doesn't feed my spirit or
sustain my passion in the same way that spicy, peppery foods do.
Sometimes people don't understand how I
can go long periods of time without eating and still keep my energy up without suffering fatigue (I
sometimes forget to eat). I read a passage in a book this morning that brought
this thought directly to mind:
“...in Vodou mental construct,
exposition to fire after death is not a punishment like in the hell of the
monotheistic religions, but a means of energizing the souls to counteract the
effect of entropy.”
In other words, fire keeps the soul
strong enough to fulfill its purpose. The book goes on to state that entropy “is
a dreaded state or situation for the surviving semedo.”
“Semedo” is a Dahomean term for what the
wise men of ancient Kemet understood as the subtle Body Double that survives
after a person's dense physical body ceases functioning.
In Portuguese “Sem Medo” means “Without
Fear.” The Semedo/body double can only conceive of a reality without fear once
it ceases to identify exclusively with the temporality of the dense physical
body it is encapsulated in. Da homies in Dahomey were visited by the Portuguese
as far back as the 17th century.
The Portuguese were not looking for
pepper, though. They were looking for that smokeless fire brought to the
Western hemisphere in chains and shackles.