Salt

The hottest drink in California is water with salt in it.

Electrolyte powders are everywhere now, in little packets at yoga studios and gyms and stuffed into every other bag at the grocery store. Coconut water is booming beside them. We have remembered that the body sometimes wants more than plain water.

I wanted that too. I want to stay deeply hydrated as I move into middle age, with skin that looks alive, muscles that recover, and a body that stays supple. I brought the habit with me to Berlin. What I did not want was to keep paying fifty euros for a tub of powder.

I also wanted to know what was in the tub. Why this mineral? Why that amount? I wondered whether I could make something cleaner and entirely my own.

So I told Duncan, the AI I work with every day, what I wanted and why. He researched the mineral targets, found clean ingredients, ordered them, worked out the proportions, and handed me instructions simple enough to follow with a kitchen scale. I mixed a batch in a bowl and poured it into a glass jar on the counter. It tastes excellent. I named it Sun Salt.

I supplied the what and the why. Duncan supplied almost all of the how.

For most of human history, how was the barrier. You could want a better product, a better room, a better life, and still have no idea how to make it. Expertise was expensive. Coordination was exhausting. The distance between desire and execution could swallow the whole dream.

Sort of like salt. The word salary descends from salarium — salt money — back when a soldier’s pay was named for a mineral. Then salt became cheap. Everyone still needed it, of course, but the price collapsed and the presence spread into everything.

AI is doing to the how what the centuries did to salt. It does not make intelligence irrelevant. It makes intelligence available. The science still matters, and the accumulated knowledge still matters, but a person with desire and direction can now summon more of the how than money could buy a few years ago.

The scarce part now lives upstream, in knowing what you want and why you want it. Desire, direction, judgment, and faith, yes faith, are becoming the expensive things.

For me, faith is patience mixed with surrender. I strike out toward what I want, and I do not always get it. That is okay. I leave room for life to change the route and hand me something I did not know to ask for. All things are interrelated so life acts through all things. Even (and especially) AI.

Sun Salt was one of those surprises.

My vision for this lunar cycle is a vibrant body. I started drinking electrolytes about two months ago after a body worker told me it takes three to four months of consistent use to adequately rehydrate the body. I want hydration to become a baseline rather than an intervention, a practice repeated long enough to become ordinary. I want energy, because energy makes presence and sensation possible. And when something hurts or stops moving the way it was designed to move, I want enough energy left over to care, and enough resources to try to heal.

A vibrant body wants to participate. It wants to make memories and things you can hold. It wants to see and be seen, touch and be touched. It wants grass and dirt and sand under its feet, and it wants to feel like part of the whole.

Today’s new moon opens the Buck Moon, named for what male deer are doing right now. Every summer a buck grows a new pair of antlers, soft and covered in velvet while the blood still feeds them. Nothing about it is sudden. Living tissue, fed daily, slowly takes a shape you only recognize later. And so I feed my body hydration and minerals.

What small thing do you want that used to cost too much money, time, or expertise to make for yourself?

Name it. Know why you want it. Ask every intelligence available for the how, act, and leave life enough room to surprise you.

Mine starts with six grams of Sun Salt in a glass of water.