I, Worm

This Morning, No 67

*A note to say, this is a long one, and may not show up in its entirety in your email. You can click on it and view it through a browser to get the whole thing.*

It was the last night of college, spring of 2016, and I was drunk. We were all drunk. I was standing in a group of people and the question came up; what was everyone’s plan after this? For their life? Small talk. I said that I was going to start cooking professionally, with plans to become a chef. To which, a man named Joey Reynard said something like, Oh, you are the quintessential domestic goddess. I think he meant it as a compliment. I’m not sure. Like I said, we were drunk, but I was furious. How dare he denigrate my professional ambitions to the sphere of the domestic? That was not the intention…By that time the following year, I would be cooking at the #11 ranked restaurant in the world (at the time), Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

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Last week, I hosted a retreat alongside Satya Doyle Byock and Emma Rastatter. The intention behind the retreat, in Satya’s words:

“Through the use of storytelling, self-investigation, group chat, and dialogue, we'll clarify the steps we each need to Separate from past dynamics or belief systems that no longer serve us; Listen to our bodies and souls for what they know about our paths; clarify what we need to Build (or deconstruct) to make a life of stability and meaning possible; and craft a dream for how Integration in our lives might appear. You can imagine this retreat like when you re-center the navigation arrow on the map on your GPS: understanding where you are and re-centering you to move with clarity onwards on your journey.”

In our first workshop, Satya prompted us to write about the question, what brought you here? Exactly like the opening session last year, I felt that I didn’t have much to say, more curious about other people’s stories. I started to write about the literal thing that brought me there. Cooking. My job. Cooking had brought me to this place; the first time a few years back to cater the wedding of Emma and Wiley, the owners of Saturn’s Return and my dear friends. Now cooking had once again called me back for a third time.

I am a card-carrying member of the Openly Sobbing Community. If something moves me, I am ready, willing and able to cry profusely. It’s a joy, a release. I believe that I got inoculated with this trait while watching too much Oprah as a child. Though I briefly was feeling disconnected from the prompt, it just so happens that I was the second person to cry. I was spurred on by my friend’s tears a past co-worker of mine, who shared what drove her to come. She is a chef as well and shared about her desire to clarify her relationship to nourishment; how she nourishes herself and others. Coming from a place of depletion, she knew that this retreat would be a catalyst for deeper understanding of the role of food and nourishment in her life. She trusted me to nourish her literally, along with the space and Satya’s teachings to deepen and clarify a more holistic experience of being nourished.

Well, as a member of the OSC, the flood gates had opened and off I went, tears welling in my eyes. To me, tears are like a yawn. Once I see someone crying, it’s just a matter of time. When it came my turn to share, I could hardly get the words out. I was struck by how much cooking had given me and how close I once was to leaving it professionally. It had brought me to all sorts of different places, embedded me in various communities, and connected me with so many of the people I love most. There had been a time where I felt so disconnected from cooking as an occupation. I was disinterested in the competitive masculine culture of it, the who’s-who in restaurants, the general feeling of cooking from a place to impress rather than to feed, and the inescapable physical toll that it takes on my body. It all made me feel as though I would have to flat out reject it, because it wasn’t feeding me anymore. It was the anti-thesis of nourishment. It had become depleting, extractive, disorienting.

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In trying to parse out the role of food in my life, my therapist asked me a few months back if it comes from a maternal place in me. I replied adamantly - no! - With a similar fervor that Joey Reynard provoked in me years back. I explained to her and to others subsequently, that the sensation I got when I began cooking at age seven, was one of deep competency. Like I had unlocked a way to care for myself, to feed myself. My interest in cooking and modeling how, I’ve always felt, was more to show people another way for them to get closer to themselves, to their own lives, to feed themselves. Not for me to be in a state of perpetually feeding, of mothering. In talking to Henry (my husband and chef, if you’re a new reader) about it, his reaction was that his cooking does come from quite a maternal space. His easy acceptance of this made me wonder why in myself, it felt like something I needed to reject. I had been reading The Way of Woman by Helen M. Luke after learning about it in a recent Elise Loehnen piece prior to the retreat. It had been stirring a lot of thoughts in me, and also felt a bit triggering. It’s a book that I would recommend reading with discernment (like all books), but I have been finding it such a companion guide to the feelings I’ve been moving through this past week.

“As we look back on the extremely rapid emergence of women in this century into the masculine world of thought and action, it is not surprising that woman has fallen into increased contempt for her own values.”¹

Unlike last year, we had men, women, and gender non-conforming persons present at the retreat. What this dynamic brought to the forefront of many of our conversations, and the general makeup of the group was the balance of masculine and feminine energies within each of us.

Let me tell you briefly about how cooking has felt to me in parts of my life when I was working within masculine dominated spaces, and then perpetuating that framework in my own process of cooking thereafter. The thing is, I could do it. Which was a gift. I could slink into those masculine dominated spaces and get by, thrive even. Maybe it was part of growing up in New York City, the intensity of that environment, but when I need to, I can play the game. Though that can be distorted and not coming from a place of authenticity, it can also be very helpful. Cooking through the masculine was for me (is, when I slip back in) thrilling, fast-paced, results driven, efficient, confident, impressive, full of pride, strong. It is also depleting, divorced from the process, not sustainable, shallow, creates a false sense of time scarcity, egoic, pressurized, and monetized. Cooking last week felt like it was coming from a distinctly feminine energy within myself. Expansive, generous, playful, creative, timeless, nourishing, helpful, intuitive, maternal, beautiful, easy, efficient, ego-less (still ego, just less), an offering.

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“It is time for woman to turn from this hidden contempt for the feminine values so that she may cease to identify creativity solely with the productions of thought and with achievements in the outer world. It is exceedingly hard for us to realize, in the climate of Western society, that the woman who quietly responds with intense interest and love to people, to ideas, and to things is as deeply and truly creative as one who always seeks to lead, to act, to achieve. The feminine qualities of receptivity, of nurturing in silence, and secrecy, are whether in man or woman as essential to creation as their masculine opposites and in no way inferior.”²

A retreat-goer turned friend shared a quote that a professor said to her, in connection to a series of her paintings, that became a prevalent phrase during our time together.

“Do not try to make an antidote to the world’s problems. Instead, create something beautiful by which we see the rest of the world in contrast.”

I won’t pretend that cultivating a space where we enjoy our lives through food and wine and talk openly about our dreams and conflicts, and sleep in beds with nice linen sheets, and dip in the cold Pacific waters is a cure-all to the seemingly insurmountable odds of our times. But I do know for myself, it screws my head back on straight and reorients me towards what it means to live a good life. My good life, the only one I have. It also clarifies how wildly distorted things have gotten and how our needs are really quite simple. To be witnessed, to eat well, to get rest, to have shelter, to be safe, to have the dignity of good work, to connect, to laugh, to dance, and to be reminded of our own agency.

What felt clear to me, was that part of the power of this retreat, was operating it out of a feminine framework. It was an offering. We were creating the circumstances for personal discovery and growth. We were tending to the soil, not pummeling the crops with pesticides, forcing it to grow in just one uniform way.

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During the retreat we turned to divination decks. I pulled the earthworm card from an animal oracle deck, and let me be honest when I say, I was slightly disappointed. It can’t get less sexy than a worm. Naked and wriggling. How humble…I thought reaching for something positive. In sitting with the card, it brought to mind a passage I had recently read in The Way of Woman:

“The feminine soil – if only one could be just that – passive, quiet, receiving the seed, waiting for the sun to shine, for the rain to fall from heaven – quite without responsibility for anything. What a rest that would be from all foolish striving. Would one not simply be humble then, identified with the humus, the soil of life?”³

Yes, I too am triggered by words like passive, quiet, receiving the seed. Particularly when I think about it through the lens of female as gendered. But, when I think about it as the energy of the feminine, of the feminine soil that all people have within them, in their own particular balance between masculine and feminine, not just one or the other, than it does bring rest to my mind. In reconnecting to the imagery of the worm, it occurred to me that my work is rather worm-like. To create the circumstances, aerate the soil, for others and myself to thrive. Not because I’m depleted and over-extending myself, but rather because I’m resourced and have something to give. To remind people of their own life-force and provide them with the necessary nutrients.

I shared this poem on the final night.

Love After Love

Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

After I read it last year, Emma wrote it down on parchment paper and stuck it on the fridge. In processing the experience of the retreat these past few days, I kept walking by it, and stopping to read it again and again. In maybe my tenth read-through a day or so ago, it occurred to me that this poem is all we are doing. All we need to do. We’re saying, sit here. We’ll give you wine and bread. You just sit, feast on your life. Inevitably, you’ll figure out the rest. You’ll turn towards yourself, and smile at the other’s welcome. I turn toward myself and smile.

1. Helen M. Luke, The Way of Woman: Awakening the Perennial Woman (New York: Doubleday, 1995) 8.

2. Helen M. Luke, The Way of Woman, 8.

3. Helen M. Luke, The Way of Woman, 3.