After writing Going Where the Cigar Lives, I found myself returning to a simple question.
If the experience changes when we meet a cigar where it lives—where is that?
In asking that question, I was transported back to 1981, when I was a freshman at UC Davis. I had enrolled in an art class to balance a curriculum that leaned heavily on science and technology.
In one of the first classes, our teacher had us work in charcoal. The drawing tables were arranged in a circle, with a table in the center holding a loose pile of fruit and wooden blocks. Our assignment was to draw the pile.
I was proud of what I had drawn—precise, accurate, a reflection of what was sitting in front of me.
When the teacher came by, he looked at it and said, “You draw like an engineer.”
I didn’t know what he meant, but I knew it wasn’t a compliment. He continued:
“It’s too precise. There’s no energy in it. You drew all the objects, but they sit on the page individually. I could cut each piece out, hang them as a mobile, and it would have more energy than your drawing. There’s no relationship between anything here.”
Confused, I asked him, “What do you mean by energy?”
He paused, then said something that changed everything.
“Don’t draw the objects. Draw the space between them. That’s where the energy lies.”
Then he added:
“You draw what you feel the energy looks like.”
After that, I opened a new page in my sketchbook and drew what I felt the energy looked like between the objects.
When I finished, the drawing kind of resembled the pile in front of me.
But my analytical mind pushed back. There were no definitive shapes.
I must have had a conflicted look on my face, because the teacher walked over to my desk. He looked at the drawing for a few seconds, put his hand on my shoulder, and said,
“Now you’re beginning to understand.”
As cigar smokers, we tend to experience a cigar as a collection and a progression of flavors.
Coffee. Cocoa. Spice. Sweetness.
We notice what shows up, how long it stays, and what comes next. Over time, we get better at naming those moments. We learn to recognize patterns. First third, second third, final third. Strength builds. Flavors shift. Something fades, something replaces it.
It becomes a sequence.
And in that sequence, each piece stands on its own as we describe it and move on to the next—coffee becoming cocoa, cocoa giving way to earth, spice building and then receding, sweetness showing up somewhere in the middle.
The experience feels complete, everything accounted for, and each part remains separate, sitting there on its own, like objects on a page.
But think about it for a moment—do you actually remember it that way?
For a long time, that’s how I experienced cigars. I paid attention to what showed up, how it changed, what came next—coffee, cocoa, spice, sweetness—until it all felt complete, as if nothing was missing.
But something was.
I couldn’t quite name it at first, only that the experience felt resolved without ever quite coming together. It wasn’t until I started paying attention differently that things began to open up—not to the flavors themselves, but to how they behaved.
How something would linger just a moment longer than expected, how a note would rise, then fall back without fully disappearing, how sweetness would approach but never quite settle into place.
That’s when it started to click.
Where a cigar lived wasn’t in the flavors. It was in how those flavors related to each other—in how one element leaned into another, how something pressed without breaking the structure, how a core held steady while everything else moved around it.
That’s where I began to feel it.
In the space between them.
Once I started seeing it that way, something else became clear.
Every cigar carries its own energy.
And over time, I noticed how that energy gathers, how it holds, how it either comes together or slowly drifts apart, shaping the experience in ways that aren’t always obvious at first.
And somewhere along the way, the cigar stopped feeling like a sequence of flavors and started to feel like something that either sustains itself or doesn’t—something that reveals its integrity not through what it shows, but through how it comes together.
That’s where it lives.
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