Where Strangers Become Friends

Lay a fresh tablecloth on the ground, or maybe a table, with a bowl of clean water for guests to wash their hands. Spread fragrant breads, ripe fruit, steaming tea and honey, traditional plov (pilaf), sumptuous sweets, and season it all with a blessing. This is Dastarkhān: a Central Asia tradition Uzbeks still embrace in their abundant hospitality. When our group of Ibu Fringe Road travelers sat down for a traditional meal in Samarkand, we were offered plastic gloves so that we could enter that generosity of spirit and also learn the local etiquette of eating this feast with our hands.

I'm for anything that breaks through our usual restraint and deportment to bring unfamiliar tastes, fearless adventure, human connection, and gales of laughter. I looked down the table that evening at our random group of women who had, a few days prior, not known each other at all, now diving into plov and conversation and delight and, already, into friendship, entering into another kind of grace at the table.

The Dastarkhān tradition reminds me of Thanksgiving, a ritual where we also set a table of abundance for family or friends, blessing the gifts of this life, including each other. Forks and knives, or spoons and hands—whatever. The food is warm and smells of love.

At the table. This is where strangers become friends. It's why I love traveling, because food universally carries the imperative to share. Hospitality is baked into it.  Lauren, above in bright yellow, ducked into a tea house while we circulated through a public market, presumably to check her mobile for work updates, but instead was insistently invited to join a table of women who could not bear to see her drink tea alone.

In a time of stark idealogical and political division such as we are in, when togetherness seems strained if not impossible, the table calls us back to each other. Food carries our common need for sustenance, as well as our craving for beauty and amity, and offers on a good day—pleasure, revelry, joy.

Difference can be invigorating and generative, if we can only get back to the table; if we can feast together on the sweet abundance and blessing of life that is freely ours. I wish you the grace of a Dastarkhān tomorrow.A table lit with loving-kindess, glasses filled with tenderness, and heaping platters of gratitude. A place where even the strangers in the family take off their protective gloves and join a banquet of love.

All the best,
Susan Hull Walker
Creative Director and Founder