Of Complex Recipes

Happy Birthday, Krista

Today is the 5th of January. Our youngest sibling was born today. She died in 2004, when she was 15. And it is very strange to think of those two things together. She said she wanted to be a chef. She was sure about that. And...I love thinking of that.

She was the smartest of us. My parents met at the University of the West Indies, StAugustine. Both on scholarship. My father did five years of secondary school in three. The older of my younger sisters rolled through her four-year (heavily practice based) undergrad degree in two and a half…

Krista. I remember one time a friend who had gone on to secondary school called her with some homework trouble. We, postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago, still have a Common Entrance / Secondary School Entrance Exam, with a suggested minimum age for sitting it and Krista was younger than her classmates, so... She repeated standard five. The rest of her class had written the exam. Her friend, accustomed as she was to calling for help with schoolwork, called Krista on the landline. After they spoke and she’d asked Krista the problem, Krista said, well, I don’t know, but let me go and find out and I’ll call you back.

So Krista Marie Rostant comes off the phone with the question that her friend had verbally told her, about a subject she’s not studied and goes into the library. (Teacher’s home folks, we had a library. The room was called the library. There was a full set of World Books and an Encyclopaedia Britannica). Krista goes to the library, does research and calls her friend back with an answer.

All this to say, I can only imagine. I wonder what she would have created, what her food would have been like.

About a year later at the graduation from primary school, Kris told Dad that she’d be dancing, so Dad rolls up to the graduation, Krista collects prize after prize and when the dance starts, Dad is looking for his daughter and can’t see her. Dancing continues, then the drumming changes and the corps parts and the Bélé Queen sails in. Krista.

Typical her. “I’m dancing”, not “I’m the Bélé Queen.”

It is the 5th of January, 2026 and Venezuela is being managed by the US. Maybe to hedge against the flow of narcotics, maybe to keep their natural reserves safe, maybe because they had the temerity to sell oil in Yuan and that threatens the petrodollar…who knows. We are here in Trinidad and Tobago, eight miles from the mainland - also a petroleum economy, and so much tinier than the Bolivarian Republic…and work and school and life and Soca continue as warships mass in the seas…

What can you do, really?

When you lose people. You understand temporality in different ways. You understand that much of humanity is based on agreements. We’re operating in the illusions of control and continuity. Uncertainty isn’t something as distant and infrequent as we think.

We are living and loving and working and walking one another along, breathing all the while. That’s the continuum in my mind - breathing. Breath is first and fundamental. I began teaching what I now call the Breath Governor to help people find continuity and control when everything else feels uncertain…because it is.

Much of my work and the reason I start with the exhale is that if you can control your exhale or rather, when you make the decision to fully allow your exhale and then surrender to receive the inhale; The world is different. Not different because the world has changed, it’s different because you’ve changed in relationship to it.

My first practice - the initial name for my business was Radical Breathing. Radical as in from the root. I started when the world was afraid of sharing breath and five years later this is still a time of so much foment. The uncertainty has been exhausting and time feels both like a blur and an eternity. I return daily to my personal breath practice, because I need it. I share the Alivefulness Reset so you can create those small anchors of stability.

We need moorings and practices, small routines and tiny devotions, flags and shibboleths and anchors to signal us to truth in uncertain times.

So, as you’re going along today, remember to breathe, not to “take a deep breath”, but to exhale. Don’t wait. Intentionally exhale as fully as possible. Then allow a portion of the great grand generous ocean of air to rush in. Maybe send a birthday wish to Krista Marie Rostant, wherever her energy is, dancing, smiling, cooking up some fabulous thing. Maybe we get it, Kris. Maybe we get it. Maybe sometime we make sense of it all.

_Alyssa

A Rostant creates Strategic Breathwork™ and the Alivefulness™ framework. She studies and teaches what it means to breathe, which is to say, what it means to be alive.