It's important to cook

 

"Give the ones you love wings to fly, 

roots to come back

and reasons to stay."

- The Dalai Lama 

 

"I was glad my kitchen included the large saimin bowls I'd found, and kept since Max and No'e were children. The sturdy restaurantware held up with all the packing and unpacking of a lifetime with only minor chips. Like wrinkles I could account for every one of the nicks; a hasty washing, an angry morning of cold cereal and hot words. There were six bowls in all, I found two with no old wounds and set them on the drainboard. The egg noodles were nearly ready, just a second cup of cold water to cool them. I covered the old porcelain pot and dug in the frig for green onions.

"Can I help?" Max asked.

"Sure." I washed the tender onions and handed them to Max, noticing his incredibly large hands and thick fingernails. Not for the first time. He found a knife in the crockery pot where I stuck the cutlery and felt the edge." 

- 'One bowl of food' from The Joy Weed Journal

Pete and I are tucked into the vardo today safe within the curved roof and stainless steel walls of this wagon home and in a middle ground of safe when we step out the wagon door onto the porch and safety pinned addition we occupy to cook. That space appears to be as whole and secure as brick-and-mortar solidity (for what that's really worth) but at closer inspection the 'door' is a flannel curtain and our floor is the real and true sloping earth covered with a rubber pad to insulate our feet. 

Mostly, our everyday Safety Pin Cafe is somewhere we can cook. I read this from NY Times food writer Sam Sifton this morning. It struck so close to my heart and the feelings going on for me:

"... I think it’s important to cook, wherever you are and whatever you’re experiencing, at whatever step on the economic ladder you find yourself now, to cook with what you have in front of you, with what you can scrounge, and to cook it to the best of your ability, to make it lovely in your own eyes, to your own palate. I think that cooking is a gift to yourself and to the world beyond yourself. So stick with me here, even when there are storm clouds above, when all you want to do is scream, or put your head in a pillow, or walk until you can’t walk any longer. A sobering truth about life right now: You should get comfortable being uncomfortable. "

The words "it's important to cook" is just where I'm at during these times of getting comfortable being uncomfortable . Thing is I LOVE TO COOK ALMOST ANYTIME. Cooking is something, besides writing, I just love to do for all the reasons Sifton suggests. Cooking helps me feel. Cooking makes me feel I am creating something yet to be from ingredients I see one at a time. I feel the way my bamboo spatula moves through a pot of oats in water on its way to becoming oatmeal for breakfast and know the changes when the spatula is resisted ... the oatmeal is getting there. Simple stuff. Alchemy. Magic. 

Lately, I've become very self-conscious and unsure about cooking to share. Covid has made me and so many others unsure about most everything. For me, the gifting of food I've cooked, baked or cobbled together has been a form of expressing love. I learned that early. My Ma cooked to show affection. She didn't breast-feed me but she did show me what cooking could do. 

We are new to settling-in and learning to be with friends as neighbors in a developing sense of community and reciprocity; how do we give-and-take in mutually loving and respectful fashion? The process is just that ... Astrologically, Satori wrote this as a possible way to sense the story yet to be cooked:

" What we want, what we have, our desires and values… are changing. You can’t balance what’s not yet set. But we can find satisfaction and pleasure now in sometimes hitting a moving target. Look for pleasure that sits right with at least some of your values and find satisfaction – for a time. It’s enough. Or it can be."

I straddle the stepping stones of my life, carrying a walking stick to steady myself. Here at the screen, with my fingers on a keyboard, I am familiar with the possibility the story will find its way out my fingertips. In times like these, when the satisfaction I milk from writing substitutes for the dish of sweet and sour meatballs I would have loved to share with friends. The caution and the uncertainty of safely sharing love? Oh, the grief of having to withhold.

So, while I grind away with the changes going on in my world of cooking, I turn to an old medicine story, the mythic memoir, the worded magic of a dish -- The Joy Weed Journal, written while I reinvented myself in the woods of Forest Lane -- offer to the page rather than a friend's hands. 

We are in a story still being written, and edited. The sweet and sour meatballs with perfectly pot-cooked brown rice were so so very ono. Pete and I ate and ate to that point of blissful fullness, and then ate some more.

While we all learn what is important and who it is we are making those decisions even as they change, let me not give-up on the many reasons to cook with love. Somehow in the writing, I lost myself and the reality that it was anger I was not allowing. I was feeling it, but not getting at it. I need a punching bag ... but didn't have one. 

 I used words to express my anger. But somehow they got twisted around until FINALLY TOOK IT OUT ON MY PILLOW. BAM!BAM!BAM!

It was my skin (itching to get out of my skin) that finally got the message to me.  I needed to deal with the itch of irritation, the anger needing to get out. I went here:

The ABC's OF ANGER By Susun Weed 

Sleep took me to an old setting where my worthy public image as teacher found a way to be recognized. I fit in my skin, didn't fit in a pair of jeans that looked cool, but were far too tight. I found garments to be comfortable in. Someone in the dream recognized it was 'my work' that did it ... whatever it was I did. The details slip, but the affects let me to wake with satisfaction. My wounded-ness, stirred up again because my outlet for giving love (giving food) inflated an old grudge. 

A new morning opened itself to me. My astrologer friend Satori answered a question about why grudges are rubbing at us/me. I asked if it was Chiron. She answered:

"Yes, but more specifically because the veneer covering the grudges is being torn away at the same time (by the interconnection with Mars and the Cap stellium as Jupiter sextiles Neptune). Grudges are always around, but we’re so stripped down now that we can’t function with so much cloaking..."

Today was a food shopping day. Pete went alone; I stayed and wrote more story for Little Frog and sent it off. I made myself breakfast of toast and an egg. The turquoise-shelled egg turned out to be a twin -- a double-yoked deep orange treat. That fed me delight, and then I went on to do my part in the many-stepped process of food shopping, unpacking, wiping down, and making space in our Safety Pin Cafe for new arrivals.

Among the goodies Pete bought were these

Half-price ripe bananas. It is important to cook! Imagine what I can get up to with all these bananas and the fresh bag of brown rice flour and bottle of Napa Valley organic olive oil?

I'm thinking ... banana bread, or muffins.