The Moment The Flower Opens

The Bud

Seen from outside, a bud is a small form folded in upon itself. We cannot yet make out every detail of the appearance it will take when it opens. Still, we lean closer. Something coming into being has a particular pull on our attention. The small possibility on the pepper branch can hold our gaze as we imagine what it might bring.

Biberify began growing its own hot peppers in 2016. That beginning is the first such leaning-in within the story. Curiosity about a plant opens into curiosity about what might be made with it. At first there is a pepper and an attention directed towards it; later decisions develop from that encounter.

In Book IX of the Metaphysics, Aristotle considers the difference between an ability and its exercise through examples: a builder retains the ability when work pauses, while the capacity for sight is exercised in seeing. Potentiality and actuality help us recognise that a real ability can exist before a particular task is undertaken.

The bud on the branch is accompanied by the curiosity of someone imagining a pepper sauce. Alongside the plant’s capacity to develop is a human ability acquired through learning. The work a pepper-inspired idea leaves to its maker is to develop that ability while coming to know the material.

• The pepper’s botanical portrait, from flower to fruit

Learning Through Practice

A flavour imagined in the mind can fit easily into a few words: lively, deep, gentle. Applied to a pepper sauce, they still leave us asking which aroma we want to bring forward, how the heat should be felt and which aspect of the food it might accompany. Seeking answers turns the idea into work that calls for decisions and effort.

In the same book, flute-playing is a capacity acquired through practice. Work lies between hearing a skilled player produce a sound and learning to shape it with one’s own breath. Knowing how a melody should sound leaves much still to learn about finding its intervals while playing.

Bringing this thought to a sauce idea reveals that an attempt need not concern ingredients alone. We also learn to say more clearly what we seek. A detail that seemed unimportant in an earlier encounter may inform the next decision. Curiosity about skill then reaches beyond obtaining a result towards understanding why a particular detail matters.

Learning changes the shape of attention. Where we first noticed only a whole, we may later discern a transition; another encounter refines a judgment about one quality. This refinement returns to the idea itself. Working with what we sought at the beginning helps us describe it more precisely.

Where Care Is Directed

In the story of Biberify hot sauces and their fermentation, the bud image opens towards a search for flavour. Considering that transformation directs attention towards the work given to an idea’s becoming real. Waiting becomes part of attending to the form it might take. To wait for the flower to open also means sustaining an interest.

Aristotle argues that a rational capacity can produce contrary outcomes. In suitable circumstances, desire or choice determines which outcome is realised. The question we draw from this discussion concerns the quality we seek to realise in pursuing a flavour idea. Clarifying that intention begins to give direction to the decisions ahead.

Care is a way of sustaining that intention among particulars. There is room to move between seeing a pepper as material that fits an idea and reconsidering the idea through the pepper’s qualities. In that space, the material can educate the idea as the idea gives direction to the material. Deciding asks for closer attention.

Imagining a fermented hot pepper sauce also calls for openness to a familiar ingredient’s transformation. The first relationship with the pepper expands through a newly perceived possibility. Our flowering analogy rests on that openness: working on something while allowing it to raise a question we did not know to ask at the outset.

• Understanding transformation in fermented hot sauce

Recognising A Beginning

“That was when the flower opened.” Returning to this line in Biberify’s own account gives the bud on the branch a second meaning. The opening flower describes a pepper-inspired idea taking a form that can be encountered. An image arising from the plant’s growth becomes a way of speaking about human work.

At the end of the story, we turn towards the bud again. We return to its first form with the knowledge developed through working with it. In that small knot on the branch, we can now recognise the beginning of an undertaking we could not yet name when we first leaned closer.

Its place early on a calendar is only part of what makes that bud a beginning. The interest growing from it becomes work, giving the image its place in the story. The moment of flowering can also be read as the moment we recognise what the initial curiosity has opened towards. A beginning finds its meaning through the undertaking.

The story of a bottle of fermented hot pepper sauce carries an interest reaching back to that small beginning. Encountering its flavour, we can recall that the idea leading to it may once have been as small as leaning towards a bud on a branch. The flower has opened; a possibility within that first attention has taken a recognisable form.

• Past, present and future within a bottle

• Curiosity as an invitation to the table: Why “Raise Your Threshold!”