Into Me See
On Cooking or Some Ingredients for Life
Join in for a workshops in Chicago in December. Colder months are seasons of slowing down and turning in. To start, strengthen, or sustain a creative writing or meditation practice, schedule a virtual 1:1 session. Pair your creative practice and ingredients with a journal from Odette Press.
I’m taking a break from video/podcast recording for some time; you can visit with the archive here.
“We cannot control what comes our way. So we find out how to work with what comes: ingredients, body, mind, feelings, thoughts, time, place, season, flavors, taste. To actually relate with things — to move and be moved by things — is the heart of intimacy. The way of growing in wisdom and compassion and peace and fulfillment.”
— Edward Espe Brown
The November when I was twenty one was the autumn I arrived to cooking in earnest. There in the shared slanted kitchen that sloped as if half-drunk toward the backyard I would stand, stilling body, finding familiar rhythms of my knife’s blade against the wooden board. Time and time and time passed and I cut into leek, cabbage, peach, apple, onion, watching as a whole universe stared back: a fruit or vegetable as if an open eye radiating out from a core, revealing itself from the intimacy of center.
What is cooking but a love language that connects us all across space and time or a mediation of time, flavor, space? To be earnest is to embody your life with “sincere and intense conviction” and it was there in the half-drunk house where I learned to meet myself with that focused intensity, finding my way into fruits cored and piled high for pies, condensing down some insight for dinner, revealing some truth and finding an exhale or feeling, making sense of an intense decade while warming to life over stove, plate, some flame.
The kitchen speaks to us in closeness and cooking is timeless and keeps us in time. We need to know the feeling of flame, heat, time, grain, fruit, spice, sweetness in order to make the meal converge. Tell the time, the texture, the temperature, how the dishes form over heat and cold, their levels of acid and sweet and salinity. A timer sits omniscient on the stove taking notes so bread doesn’t go black. We speak to the earth; she gives us pear, soil, ocean, peppercorn, curry leaf, bay leaf, potato, apples, fire, and our bodies made of nutrient, discernment, and breeze. For as long as humans have been alive we have needed food, and these needs tether us to the continuity, generosity, and reciprocity of being with nature.
What did I know at the time in that slanted house? The best that I could. I see now, with sharper knife and softer eyes, and recall the flame on the ranges laid out across all kitchens of my memories. I have learned how to cook hot and fast, and how to be kinder with myself, and how to be sincere with a vegetable or obstacle, and what to do with old soup, and when to be slower and tender, and I am still learning. Still I cup ingredients tenderly and learn each day how to hold them firmly, softly. In Zen it is said that we cook in a way where we hold each ingredient as if it is your eye, and in the Zen kitchen, nothing goes to waste. All memories and ingredients of instinct and eating exist in us when creating, and so nothing goes to waste in us.
Seed of story, fruit of memory, layers of understanding or onion. What can we find when sitting, being, writing, cooking, tasting? The core of feeling, being, or the essence of our core. We digest our lives in our mouths, skin, in our colors and words, in our momentum, from the core, or places where our stories converge and emerge. A tender seeded center and the places where lingering, latent, still-forming intentions and longings and reminiscing and ingredients and ideas infuse their wisdom and gather. To find the center, we have to balance, sitting upright between our hips, or else stand, with some strength and ease, as when I stand, knife in hand, chopping greens or bread or potatoes for dinner.
Intimacy — or you, fruit, us, me; “into-me-see” — or from Latin intimus “inmost, innermost, deepest”. And what could be more close and connecting than drops of water on a just-washed fruit, or your first sips of coffee, the quiet call of the kettle humming at its peak, or the silence that often dots the breaths right before the act of eating? Somewhere inside a fruit the seed is made, covering itself over so as to guard its innermost being. Yet in the soil and warmth the armor dissolves. From the seed comes an idea, the insight, the stem with yearn to flower, the leaf, the fruit, all in the slow rooting process of revealing. Food draws us close into the moment: asks for us for kindness and tenderness, gathering us up together in the wholeness of our senses. With life we take the ingredients we have and we learn to respond: word, sensation, feeling.
Softening and revealing, cooking is a place to go to cut the carrot or pie or pear to the core, to reveal the innermost center. Some moments incise their ways into us, or coax out a softness, opening us wide as we reveal our seeds and centers. A seed opens up, no armor. Love and life living asks for us to reveal ourselves, and be in the experience wholeheartedly, sincerely, fully. Sincerity is to enter into life fully, and intimacy is a known closeness and I know of no greater love language than the tender simple sincerity of a meal shared, or a glance, and the quietness of cooking.
In the morning black coffee hangs cooling in the cup as if the darkened sky holding up the new moon. I forget about the toast I set to warm until the bread announces itself. Cooking keeps us in time because it asks for our alertness, a wholehearted entrance into the moment through our senses. I take another sip, asking my ideas into the rim of the mug, what do you want to sip from?
Blackened bread. Blackened evening night. From the dark black of new moon evening sky and the heat of a warming the oven comes carrot, intention, insight. Creativity is an intimacy with the unknown, and Zen practice is one of “feeling your way in the darkness” which is to say to greet reality and every moment’s great mystery. Be tender with me, I ask the night, finding the inward season, and tell myself when cooking. Break me open and reveal seeds of reality. Beyond the defense of the seed the plant can emerge from the soil, and grow. Beyond the night where night moon stands still, the luminous emerges as the earth turns. Still, we breathe and eat, and still I find solidity, standing in the kitchen, peeling a carrot, feeling it with the ends of my fingers; feeling for the softening of pear, potato skin.
From The Studio:
Nourished by, Nourishing:
Reading The Hunger of Women by Marosia Castaldi. Listening to Run to the Center by Cornelia Murr, and “No Recipe” with Edward Espe Brown from Sounds True. Inspired by shorter runs, and weeks cold enough to again and again fire up the oven, many long walks, evening museums, a train ride to Milwaukee. I learned of the idea of intimacy as ‘into me see’ through Esther Perel’s work.