What does your soul need?
For me, this evening, it was a few good long hours in the kitchen, making things.
Every season brings its bounty, and Spring is by far the most exciting. Now in quarantine, ingredients seem anyway more precious. Here I am one, and one does not always have such an appetite to warrant grand gestures. But sometimes we need to do these things without warrant, without reason. Just because it makes us feel good, on some level of our soul. Make those cream sauces and the pastries. Have a bake sale for one. Because maybe your soul needs it.
I wonder if you have noticed this also, the “quarantine effect” — which is to say, the things we set out for ourselves to do, and the ones we actually end up doing. In other words, what are we being drawn to?
I often find myself in the kitchen. It is where I feel something close to mastery, or at least masterful ease, though as I learned tonight one should never get cocky or take advantage of our knowledge, for after scoffing away measuring utensils out of both necessity and pride, I failed miserably at making Hollandaise, and ended up having a moment where I truly turned inside with shame and had to face my grandmother within and tell her, Nana, I failed. But of course she hugged me and laughed it off and we made do with other things, and anyway, the Hollandaise isn’t going to be eaten before tomorrow and perhaps that’s the lesson from Nana, always eat a Hollandaise when it’s fresh.
I go through the park and find myself without control hugging trees, craving their roots, and recognizing the abyss within me that wants to form long relationships with particular arbors. Seeing dogs around pains my heart because I miss my pack dearly, and without consciously deciding I never acquired 4-legged friends on this continent, because of travel, because I didn’t feel rooted myself and couldn’t imagine dragging another being along on that journey, lonely as it sometimes was. It seems I’ve known the whole time, on some level, that this would not be my home, but I never wanted to admit it out loud. Now I must confront the temporary nature of my life here, more than ten years after the fact.
Part of it is a change in aesthetics. I don’t like the one-foot-out (the door) style anymore. Of course the quarantine makes this all the more palpable. Where are We, literally? For all my desire to some day grow old in another land, I am here, right now, on this one, celebrating the full flower moon of May with the Germanic tribes, making their white asparagus and speaking their language.
It seems strange, but there is still an implicit curfew. Despite loosening of restrictions, people stay closer to home than they did before. A ride across town signifies more. The Governor gets on his motorcycle and I ride with him in feeling but he is not next door. He is across an ocean, along with all my blood relatives and much of my spiritual family. I am blessed here, all the same, protected. But the ocean means something more now, more like what it is — palpable distance and a lot of cold water.
It’s a beautiful day, the Governor says. I’m going to go home and take my motorcycle out for a drive. He smiles as he does sometimes, then says, “With a mask — it actually really helps, with the coronavirus, and to keep the bugs out!”
At this point in the narrative, we are all admitting how much we don’t know.
I myself sat in the park today at the foot of a tree and just watched the tears fall out of me, all the unknown answers to questions I can’t even articulate. Just watch it, I told myself, don’t try to escape or turn away, change the subject, move on, deal with it. Just be here, with me, I said. Just stay with me.
So I did, alone as I was; I didn’t really have anything else calling me away. And so they continued to come, tears about my lost love, but also other things, like my lack of a real home, the fact that I need to steal my moments with a tree in the park, rather than having one on my property that I could just go to, whenever I needed, one to which I can tell my secrets without fear of judgment or reprisal. Like this I cried for love lost, but I also cried for a tree I haven’t even seen yet, and so comes the deep breathing of rebirth. Maybe we get humble, or humiliated, but we also get just a bit more real, and certainly less blocked in the heart. Change creates movement, and in its better iterations, opens new space for cultivation.
For we can cry and complain at loss, but then it is as the Governor says, we must grow. We must put the emotions aside and use our logic, even if the only logical thing to say is,
I don’t know.
No one really knows the future. Anyone who says they do is deluded.
Here the clear thinker identifies the false choices with which we are being presented, or which we present to ourselves, on a regular basis. Though it is easier to create dichotomies for decision-making, very often life doesn’t fit into simply two categories, so it isn’t really an either/or situation.
Like public health vs. the economy.
Public health IS the economy.
If you have your health, if we have our health, we can fix everything else. Nothing else matters. We will find the money, we will work it out. But you need your health. None of these are easy decisions, but we will be okay in the end, we will find a way. That is what Grandpa Cuomo used to say, and I think we should all listen to him, like we are sitting around the table listening to the Governor now, our Archetypal father and leader, who is sitting there telling us everything is going to be okay. And I believe him, even as I know we are a long way from finished, and there are probably a good many more soulful nights needed in the kitchen, and trees hugged in the park.
The feeling I had this evening as I danced to Deep House with my women, was that this is what we ARE, this is what we need right now, our rallying cry, that of family and ceremony and nourishing the soul of our people. That is what we are here to do and what we always do and what we’ve been doing all along.
And so all we need to do is just continue to do it. Have stamina, people.
Now we’ve made it through hell,
Keep going.