Spring awakens around us in western North Carolina. I magically watch the progression up the mountains, seeing so clearly the altitude markers. Dandelion leaves and roots and red clover flowers support the liver and move out the sludge that doesn’t serve us. Stinging nettles assist in reducing inflammatory response from pollen and moving stagnation in joints. The established perennials in our small garden sprung quickly and flourish with the warming days.
Raising Sirius opened an exploration into my own childhood. I use these moments to awaken subconscious memories of my first 7 years. I can mostly only remember memories that were retold or revisited in photos. I find it difficult to find in time the young self and see what I experienced. So, in this time of present moments, the everything bagel of observing Sirius, when I feel stuck, limited, or boxed in, I breathe with a more whole sense of self and add more everything.
If anyone had told me cooking outside the home would have led me to a lifelong path of unfolding and infolding, I wouldn’t have known then what that could mean. In so many ways, I have my relationship with Justin Yu and those who supported our restaurant to thank, for pushing me to open to the truth that I am more than the sum of the parts that I could see, that hidden inside the emerging soul lives a child who didn’t get a chance to express herself often enough. My parents were still expanding how they saw the world. The childhood of ‘Yes and No’ hadn’t matured yet into full creative freedom.
Oxheart captured the first glimpses of the creator, the creative, the creation that I am. It challenged previous notions I had of the world, of myself. It unboxed me so I could be a more expansive light.
The kitchen would call forth a divine mystery my soul had been waiting for me to stand in. Using the hands extending from the heart-space, we create possibilities. The classroom of the kitchen taught me to move with ease amidst multiple things in progress, keeping track of time in various planes. A metronome of mise en place1 sets a daily pace. Cooking and baking brought me to a living center, a vibrant middle way—the kitchen of grandmother, my mother’s mother, a lineage of nurture and love.
The past collects the present moments and the future meets at the present moments. When I can be here now, I can be anywhere, everywhere.
All at once.
Enjoy my first podcast appearance where Kassata and I talk about those early days at Oxheart, the experience of staging in Copenhagen, some details of birthing Sirius at home, a mantra that’s guided me, honoring cycles, and mothering.
PODCAST LINK
mise en place: a culinary process in which ingredients are prepared and organized before cooking
Wash and chop vegetables the night before the party: Professionals call it mise en place; we call it making life easier.—Glamour