THE CAFE SUTRA

"Life begins after coffee."

Sometimes, when I’m alone in a café, he sits down and joins me.

Though we don’t speak, I feel his presence beside me, and as the steam from my cup of coffee merges with fleeting sunshine (on the rare occasion it even appears), I can almost see the outline of his silhouette, like the cloud apparition of Mufasa in The Lion King.

I suppose it was inevitable that the deeply ingrained memories of my formative years learning how to groove in cafés should result in a ghostly afterimage of the man who tutored me in the art of it — my dad.

Cafés don’t seem quite the same without him these days. No one possessed the same level of beingness in the moment while enjoying coffee, books, and a croissant as he did. He forced you — not by coercion, but by innate vibes — to feel that this was a place to submit to the moment; a place where the past and the future were hearsay, and where we would start anew each morning to dream from a fresh page or napkin (he often liked to draw on them).

There was a type of rebirth in the morning coffee ritual that set the tone for the potential of the day ahead, as if we were dreaming greatness into existence on a foundation of coffee, pastries, and dialectic.

And when we had the good fortune to find a café that also played great music, the cosmic alignment of the chief conduits for coffee-infused enlightenment became a totality of perfection that could rarely be outdone in a monastery or temple.

Perhaps it was no coincidence, then, that in his later years he referred to the café he frequented each morning as the temple, where instead of incense, he had the bittersweet aroma of coffee beans to arouse his senses and turn the ignition of his big-sky mind.

Given it’s his birthday today, I’ll be sure to pay a visit to a nearby temple and honour his memory with a cup of coffee.

And if they’re not playing any decent music in there, I’ll make sure to bring my own soundtrack.

I need total cosmic alignment for Mufasa 💛 Daddy.