The morning’s first sea bream lies before me, its scales catching dawn light like scattered stars. My hands know this next dance by heart - the precise angle needed to open the belly without piercing what lies within. A spider watches from her web between my ice bins, perhaps recognizing something familiar in how carefully I navigate around vital organs, how respectfully I handle what others might consider mere waste.
The first cut releases that particular scent that rises when interior meets exterior - not the unpleasant smell others wrinkle their noses at, but the honest breath of what usually remains hidden. My blade moves with the same delicate attention a surgeon might use, seeking the space just beside the green-gold sac of bile. One wrong move would release bitterness that would taint everything, teaching us how some boundaries must be respected, how some separations serve necessary purpose.
As I ease out the intestinal tract, it comes as a single perfect package - a universe contained in miniature. Here in my hands writhes an ecosystem of microscopic life, billions of beings living and dying and transforming each other in endless cycles of becoming. The same divine energy that spins galaxies moves through these tiny organisms, speaking through their cellular wisdom about how to extract nutrition, how to maintain balance, how to participate in the great dance of consumption and creation.
“Just guts,” a young apprentice says, watching me examine what he’s been taught to consider waste. But my market-trained eyes see deeper - how the particular fullness of the stomach tells stories about plankton blooms and ocean currents, how the color of liver speaks of water quality and season, how even parasites carry messages about the health of entire food chains. Each internal organ a testimony to how energy flows through all things, taking different forms but never truly separated.
My fingers find the tiny sparks of roe hiding beneath other organs - future lives held in perfect suspension, each egg carrying complete instructions for becoming. Not so different, really, from the bacteria teeming in the intestinal tract, or the cells in my own hands that know exactly how to grip a knife, or the spider attending to her web with ancient genetic wisdom. All of us reading from the same profound script written in the language of shared energy.
blade parts fish flesh while gut holds universe whole — one life flows through all
(what viscera teach:) truth lives in hidden places Through my morning’s work, I think about how these same processes move through my own body - the countless organisms that make digestion possible, that maintain my skin’s barrier, that help me think and feel and exist. We humans like to imagine ourselves as singular beings, but we are walking universes, sharing our existence with billions of smaller lives that make our larger life possible. My hands remember this truth that minds often forget - how we are all composed of the same cosmic energy, taking different forms but never truly separate.
A customer asks me to clean her fish quickly, to hurry through this “unpleasant” part. But my hands refuse to rush, knowing how one moment’s impatience could rupture the bile sac, could disrespect the delicate engineering that allows one life to become another’s nourishment. “Watch,” I tell her instead, showing how the organs come away together when handled with proper attention, how even in death this being maintains its perfect internal organization.
The spider in her web has caught a fly, and I watch her wrap it with the same careful attention I bring to my work. She too participates in this great transformation of life into life, this endless cycle of energy taking new forms. Her digestive processes will break down the fly’s body just as the bacteria in my gut will transform this fish’s flesh into my own sustenance. Different scales of the same eternal dance.
“See here,” I show my young apprentice, pointing to the iridescent shimmer of the peritoneum, the membrane that keeps everything in its proper place. “Even hidden things can hold beauty if we look with proper attention.” Like the biofilm that form on rocks, like the bacterial colonies in healthy soil, like the invisible organisms that keep our own bodies functioning - beauty and order exist at every scale, testimony to how divine energy expresses itself through all forms of life.
Tonight, after the market closes, I’ll clean my boards with the same attention I bring to cleaning fish. The bacteria that help break down the blood and oils are my unseen colleagues in this work, transforming what seems like waste into new forms of life. Tomorrow will bring new fish, new hidden universes to handle with care, new opportunities to witness how the same source energy flows through all things - from the smallest microbe to the largest whale, from the simplest cellular organism to the complex ecology of human consciousness.