Mother's Mother
I recently listened to a podcast shared to me before the birth of Sirius, titled, The Mineral Matrix & the Motherline That Made You – Hamid Jabbar. From this conversation, I learned that I inherited my mitochondria from my mother and what my maternal grandmother ate while pregnant with my mother, so my biology—on a metabolic level—looks for the foods my grandmother consumed.1
Both my mother and grandmother live far distances away, so Between Heaven and Earth: A Guide to Chinese Medicine by Harriet Beinfield and Efrem Korngold and The First Forty Days by Heng Ou have helped me recall the foods and herbs I need to nourish me during this post-partum time. My grandmother came to stay with my mother during both of her first days with my sister and I, preparing herbal tonics and foods to replenish the Qi, Blood, and Essence, stimulate circulation, dispel wind, lubricate the organs of downward movement, and be of service in supporting life.
“As Kalu Rinpoche says:
If a hundred people sleep and dream, each of them will experience a different world in his dream. Everyone’s dream might be said to be true, but it would be meaningless to ascertain that only one person’s dream was the true world and all others were fallacies. There is truth for each perceiver according to the karmic patterns conditioning his perceptions.”
- Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, as shared by Sogyal Rinpoche, page 116
and continuing this thread:
“…how we perceive the world depends entirely on our karmic vision. The masters use a traditional example: six kinds of beings meet by the banks of a river. The human being in the group sees the river as water, a substance to wash in or to quench his thirst; for an animal such as the fish, the river is its home; the god sees it as nectar that bring bliss; the demigod as a weapon; the hungry ghost as pus and putrid blood; and the being from the hell realm as molten lava. The water is the same, but it is perceived in totally different, even contradictory, ways.
This profusion of perception shows us that all karmic visions are illusions; for if one substance can be perceived in so many different ways, how can anything have any one true, inherent reality? It also shows us how it is possible that some people feel this world as heaven, and others as hell. “2
- page 118
Much of how I sense the world I inherited from my mother’s mother.
While in the Peruvian jungle, I narrow the distance placed between my grandmother and I, asking for her embodied wisdom to find its way to me. I miss our visits. The Canadian consulate claims that because she’s lost her passport too many times, they won’t issue her another one. The Canadian borders have been closed to me for years now because I chose to exercise choice. This distance I have lived with my whole life and only now has me wondering why we split up our family this way. (There were certain changes in immigration laws when the rest of my mother’s family decided to emigrate from Hong Kong. This is also reflected in the scattered or less dense populations of Cantonese speakers in the US.) My grandfather knew when he was going to pass. He lived quietly and could sense these things. He visited every grandchild the year before his passing. Has my grandmother been calling out to me to tell me something? My mom wrote down her recipes when we were all younger and now we sit together translating them.
I grew up enjoying ginseng, reishi, cordyceps, and shitake mushrooms, hawthorn, wild yam, goji berries, dong guai, and many other herbal medicines without English translations. The notion that herbs, food plants, and fungi had medicinal properties were well known and practiced by some in my family. My mom continues the practice of making herbal blends as my grandmother did and I too, though I use more Western recognized herbs. As a family, we drank tonic herb blends during each season and transition. There would be congee (rice porridge) and stronger medicinal herbs for when our immune systems required more fine tuning.
I think about the countless herbal beverages my grandmother and mother have made me. I recall the few times I peeked into what boiled in the pot or examined the strained matter before we returned it to the earth. I remember the times my grandmother wouldn’t let me have something prepared for my sister—the formulation destined for Angela’s constitution and not mine. Another time I did not drink the bird’s nest soup3 because I felt ashamed of either being American or being Chinese—I embodied the story of separation.
My grandmother instilled the grounded strength of a matriarchal household. My grandfather let her be her gifts and she let him be his. Through his quiet observation and compassion, he was able to be firm when he was able to sense something she wasn’t. Their partnership established a reverence for each other. Their paths always crossed but rarely collided.
Grandma wasn’t looking for industrialization to give her more freedom from work at home. Watching over the family and passing on ancient wisdom of food nourishment and herbal remedies was work that could tune us: to ourselves, to the outer world, to each other. Liberation to her was setting her own value, maintaining self-reliance rather than giving to the reliant community of microwaves, pressure cookers, cars, and currency. Most of the prices set by the System didn’t affect her. She shared anything and everything she received, knowing that there was always the law of impermanence and the law of cause and effect. Resources would just come to her. Fullness would come to those who received her gifts. Her freedom: offering gifts.
Her breath will live beyond her physical presence. My grandmother lives as that strong woman that commands a room, that demands you to sit to eat, that doesn’t let your stomach be half anything, that didn’t let anyone physically discipline you, that nourishes beyond the physical self, that wouldn’t allow more than one idea of herself in the room—she is my mother’s mother. And I am some form of my grandmother. Cooking for others has always filled my heart and spirit. In this, I am not separate from my grandmother.
My grandmother’s meditation was repetition within recipes. My grandmother never wrote a recipe down nor owned a cookbook. She passed knowledge down orally and through shared practice. She excelled in crafting dumplings, joong, egg rolls, almond cookies, and XO sauce. She never made less than 100 portions of these at a time. Her hands never seemed too big or too small for the detailed work. She cooked from a place that no longer relied on the thinking mind. She, deeply in her trance, transformed primary metabolites (carbohydrate, protein, fats) into unmeasurable alchemical expressions. The family enjoyed her gifts well beyond her extended visits.
I lived for the moments of her multi-month long stays. She cooked from sunrise to midnight, reminding everyone in their waking moments that she knew her role. I tasted everything she made throughout the day. Photos of me revealed when my grandmother resided here in Texas and when she was elsewhere. I would carry noticeable weight during her Texas residency and lean out thereafter. There was always the discussion if my mother fed me. This became one of my first physical realizations of cycles.
In the movie Minari, when the grandmother moves in with the family, she brings a suitcase of Korean goodies, herbs, and seeds. I connected with this scene as it recalled memories of sitting by Grandma’s suitcase, investigating and inquiring about every item that made it through customs. Grandmother had her strong preferences for where things were sourced and she would rather be the sourcer than go through a middle person. My grandmother came into this world with nothing and she too will leave her body with nothing, leaving her wisdom with those who paid close attention and some gold jewelry that she held as highest holder of energy conductivity, a tonic for the nervous system.
We hang a lunar calendar at my parents’ house. (I have added the lunar calendar to my cell phone.) We phone our elders on their lunar birthdays. It was hard to grasp a multi-calendar existence as a young person. I never could recall to others when we celebrated my father’s birthday because it differed every year on the Gregorian calendar. My dad, with his dad-smile, would tell me cheekily when he arrived to the US he just picked a day for the legal records. Such a beauty to celebrate on the lunar calendar as the moon appears at the same phase as at birth.
This month holds space for my grandmother’s lunar birthday. She was born on the 29th day of the 8th moon which corresponds to this year’s September 24. This moon I hold with fullness as I begin a life that transitions me into the divine feminine space of motherhood.
This is how I am perceiving at the moment: a patterning shared across a maternal lineage. The portal of motherhood courses within us all. If Gaia is our primordial mother, what can we unveil by acknowledging her place in our history?
My story lives as just one of our stories of the larger story. My singular vision may be limited, but when we all share our stories, may we expand our limited visions and experience a larger more unified truth.
We both love cooking and expressing love with our hands. Here’s an image of grandmother holding a photo of a ceramic she made, both of which sit in our coffee/tea/hot water station at home.
Grandma’s Almond Cookie
405 grams (3 cups) cake/pastry flour (or einkorn flour)
200 grams (1 cup) sugar
100 grams (2 large) eggs
235 grams (1 cup) olive oil
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 tablespoons ground almond
Mix dry ingredients. Mix wet ingredients. Combine.
Shape into small balls (2 tablespoons sized), flatten slightly onto baking pan. Brush with egg whites. They won’t expand much.
Bake at 350°F for 8-10 minutes until dry. Store in airtight container.
Mitochondria Eve explained by Smithsonian Mag: “In nearly all multicellular organisms, mitochondrial DNA is passed down the matrilineal line from generation to generation. This fact is extremely handy for researchers, who can use these DNA biomarkers to trace back the matrilineal history of a species. It’s also cool for you, if you’re a lady: It means that the mitochondria in every cell in your body can be traced back your great-great-great-you-get-the-picture grandmother. Alas, while mothers also pass their mitochondrial DNA to males, those sons cannot pass this DNA to their own children.”
Perhaps if rabbit holes are your thing, you might follow the idea that there is a common ancestor we all share.
To continue this thread, from page 119:
“Everything that we see around us is seen as it is because we have been repeatedly solidifying our experience of inner and outer reality in the same way, lifetime after lifetime, and this has led to the mistaken assumption that what we see is objectively real. In fact, as we go further along the spiritual path, we learn how to work directly with our fixed perceptions. All our old concepts of the world or matter or even ourselves are purified and dissolved, and an entirely new, what you could call “heavenly” field of vision and perception opens up.”
Bird’s Nest Soup
Many claims were made to me as a young person as to the reasons why I shouldn’t question why I should or shouldn’t be eating something. My grandmother would tell me that Bird’s Nest Soup would keep my skin young and me strong (and cost a small fortune). It would be foolish of me to counter with any argument because who wouldn’t want to look young and be strong (and waste Grandma’s money). The texture was that of soft braised beef tendon. This isn’t a bird’s nest we commonly see in trees with eggs or baby chicks. This nest is a dried gummy saliva from a bird known as a swiftlet, who lives in dark caves. The bird’s nest is often cooked over a gentle steam or in a bain marie so the nutrients are not lost. For me the savory version was incredibly hard to eat. I preferred the sweet one with rock sugar.