The Zen of Pie

When I’m stressed or afraid, I cook. There is something Zen about the measuring, the chopping, the peeling…Something about preparing food to nurture our bodies that reassures us that yes, life goes on.

On 9/11- we kept our kids home from school. My best friend Erin came over, and as everyone sat glued to CNN, terrified,  I tearfully got busy in the kitchen. First, it was enormous stacks of pancakes. Then I baked cookies. Then Spaghetti and meatballs…and on and on.

When problems get us down, Troy and I will often make soup. We’ll put on some soothing music, open a bottle of wine, stand side-by-side chopping and mincing and talking it through. Then as our concoction simmers, the aroma filling the house, we reflect and let our thoughts settle.

2011 ended so lovely that I stepped into 2012 with great optimism…but WHAM-O. Life sucker-punched us and soon there were funerals to attend, friends and family in crisis, and some major crises of our own.

So I got back in the kitchen.

Two lasagnas, five brie paninis, two garlic shrimp pastas, one mound of spaghetti, three pies, a double batch of muffins and two dozen snickerdoodles later, I still haven’t solved anything. But feeding my family and friends makes me feel, in some way, like I am sending my own kind of love out into the cosmos.

Last night, a friend who was eating my lasagne and apple pie said, “If this is what you do when you’re stressed, no one will ever wish you well.” I told her to take advantage of my stress while it’s here. When I’m happy I can get lazy, writing all day and ordering in Thai food.

For now as my worries mount, I pray, I meditate, I visualize healing, I try to write, and I cook.

Anyone hungry?

Awake

Driving my son home from Pre-k today, the sky was huge and ominous - a sky big enough to swallow you like a speck of dust. Pregnant grey rain clouds overhead threatened to burst again. But in between, patches of blue, and just enough sun to cast a soft golden glow over the suburban landscape. Rays of sunlight refused to be oppressed, forcing their way through in sharp streams of silver. My god, that sky, those clouds. I thought of the times I've stood before a Vermeer painting thinking, where are those skies? Do they even exist anymore? And here it was. Today. Just for me.

I was sitting at a stoplight, listening to Regina Spektor’s gorgeous song Samson, and everywhere I looked, the world was in technicolor bloom bathed in that golden haze. Sparrows perched on telephone wires shook the rain from their feathers and swept across wet lawns, feasting on seeds and worms. Perfection in creation. Spring. My beautiful, beautiful Spring, my favorite time of year. Signs of hope, rebirth, new beginnings. Every bud, every blade of grass poking its head through the hardened ground saying look at me! I begin again, I am reborn! And how apropos, I thought, that this should happen just as I feel my own heart is beginning to thaw,  as I shed old skin and wounds mend into silvery fine-line scars.

It was this tiny ordinary moment, sitting at a red light, when all at once, a gust of wind blew through the dogwood trees and tiny white blossoms fell like snow all around me, covering my windshield and the hood of my car, my son in his car seat giggling with wonder.

Heart-stopping. Breathless. Wonder. It overtook me, and I remembered… the world is actually a perfect place, and everything is as it should be. I forgot. I forgot for so long.

That tiny moment broke my heart. Open.

And I wept.

Because I had forgotten how it felt to be wide awake in the world.