About the Food Cart

Mission Statement

FoodCart for the Soul creates a space where we attempt to pay attention, be astonished, and share the stories of our journey in order  to support and enrich the journeys of others.

Core Principles

1.  All  ideas,  beliefs,  opinions,  and  questions  are  worthy  of  respect  and contemplation.

2.  Everyone and everything is connected and interdependent.

3.  All  creation  shares  a  collective  subconscious  that  creates  and  sustains  the universe.

4.  Science  reports  the  facts  of  the  universe;  Imagination  uncovers its meaning. The Arts invite us to experience its heart. The three work in tandem to reveal truth and need each other as much as we need all of them.

5.  There  is  more  that  unites  us  than  divides us. We are a single human species with  a  plethora  of  different  shades;  a  range  of  notes  that  form  a  harmonic chord.  What  matters  is  the  harmony  of  the  chord,  not  the  isolation  of  the notes.

6.  Stories are the best way for us to fathom from the universal subconscious the truth we need to create full and joyful lives.

7. Teaching is simply telling someone your story. Learning is creating one’s own.

8.  We  are  each  on  our  own  crazy,  beautiful,  mysterious,  painfully  frustrating, and blissfully dazzling journey; and, simultaneously, we are on the same one, together.

9.  We  change  the  world  when  each  of  us  lives  out  our  journeys  and  tells  our stories.

Cuisine, Considerations, and Curations…

Nothing brings people together quite like food. Portland, Oregon, where I live and love is the nexus of food cart culture. I’ve lived here long enough to remember when the food cart culture began to explode into what it has become today with James Beard Awards for some of them, and acclaim for many more. That’s the metaphor or frame for this website - a food cart where hungry people gather to sample some favorite or try something they’ve never tasted before.  The essays, videos, poetry, photographs, art, all all meant to be ways to find intellectual, emotional, and spiritual sustenance. 

An over-used quote, widely attributed to French idealist philosopher and Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (as well as to Wayne Dwyer, Stephen R. Covey, and Georges Gurdjieff)  proposes that "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." The point is this: the dichotomies of sacred and secular, physical and spiritual, rational and imaginative are false ones.

Everything in our lives is about our journey to a place of becoming more fully human and living lives full of joy and meaning. All roads, in a sense, lead to this place, whether it be the route of science, the way of the spirit, or the pathways of the arts. 

Since the beginning of human time - since humans acquired consciousness - we have been each and all on a journey to escape the limits of the everyday and find connection with something bigger and more magnificent than ourselves. Something we can’t explain or see, but something we know in our deepest selves is there.

And that restless heart in us compels us to seek, to ask, to wonder. . .