KitchenCosmologyNourishing Engagement with the Living Universe
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KitchenCosmologyNourishing Engagement with the Living Universe
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Blessing the Bread
Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha'olam,
Surely the
earth
I do not
believe in palmistry,
This is the
lifeline --
Praised be
thou, eternal God, ~ Lynn Ungar ~
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Giving Thanks “To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe – to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it – is a wonder beyond words. Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art. Furthermore, it is a privilege to be alive in this time when we can choose to take part in the self-healing of our world.” Joanna Macy In the early 1980’s, an orthopedic surgeon recommended that I take up biking. After a childhood of being overweight and considering myself not athletic I had begun lifting weights and running with obsessive devotion. I had run my first 10k and was training for a half marathon. Suddenly I started experiencing a nagging ache in my right knee. After many months, I finally went to see the surgeon and agreed to have arthroscopic surgery. This was going to be the answer. Whatever was wrong was going to be fixed and I’d be back running again. Unfortunately this isn’t what happened. Instead, I got the news that my particular body was not meant for running. I was going to have to give up that dream. I was heartbroken. I was also angry. After all this time, I had finally become “fit”. At last, I was beginning to see myself as an athlete. Life was so unfair. I railed against it for weeks I am sure. Then one day I had an epiphany and everything changed. I had indeed taken up biking and was riding along the seawall in Pacific Beach where I lived at the time. All kinds of people are on the seawall – running, biking, walking, skateboarding, and pushing themselves in their wheelchairs. Suddenly I saw that I still had two good legs. That I could still walk, hike and bike. I realized that I had been focusing on the wrong thing. I was actually one of the lucky ones. All of my self pity and anger flew out the window and I felt deeply grateful for my two legs that still carried me through life . . . just not running! Gratitude is a deep thankfulness for what we have, a deep appreciation for the gifts in our lives. It is, in its essence, a choice about our focus or perspective. In my own life, the choice could look like this: I can wake up in the morning and think, “I live in a tiny house that’s a bit decrepit. Our furniture is a combination of hand-me-downs and junk store finds. We don’t have any savings.” Or, I can wake up in the morning and say, “I am blessed to live on such a beautiful piece of property and to know that I have a secure roof over my head. I am blessed to have work that I love and the freedom to do the things that matter to me. I am blessed to be healthy and to have my family be healthy.” Both streams of thought are completely true, but their impacts are completely different. Try this out for yourself. What are the two versions of your own story? When you walk around telling the story of your lack, how do you feel? How do you bring yourself to the world around you? When you tell the story of all that you are thankful for, what changes? My first story grounds me in what’s missing, in a view that there is something wrong with my life and with me. It focuses all my energy on what I don’t have. When I am standing there, I feel sorry for myself. I notice all the people who “have more” than I do. Life seems unfair and it is hard for me to find any happiness. When I shift my focus to the gifts in my life, everything changes. I am blessed and secure. Rooted here, I am also in touch with my ability to give and to make a difference in the world around me. Gratitude expands my energy and my capacity. It is like a deep reservoir from which joy is always accessible. If we are alive and we have enough food to eat, we have something to be grateful for. Those of us born in the West, in particular, have lives of relative ease compared to people in much of the world. And yet, gratitude seems so profoundly missing in our culture. Why is this and how do we change it in our own lives? Actively choosing where to focus our attention is the first step. As we move through our days, we can develop the practice of putting our attention on what we have rather than on what we lack, and on what others have done for us rather than what they haven’t. My own days are filled with opportunities for giving thanks, beginning with a hot cup of coffee in the early hours when I’m off to cook breakfast for thirty! The sound of the birds singing outside my window, the breathtaking view of the morning sun breaking through layers of fog, the feeling of my strong body as I run up and down the stairs at work, the joy of taking care of people through the food I make, harvesting kale and chard, summer squash and tomatoes from the garden, having the time for a walk, hearing my son play his guitar, finding a voice message from my sister or brother. . . this list could go on and on. Every day an unending stream of gifts. I won’t pretend that I never get upset or feel crabby, that there aren’t days where I get lost in the stress of what needs to be done. I’m human and I have my moments. But it is rare these days for me to get stuck in a feeling of lack. I have spent so many years focusing on the gifts in my life that even in the worst of times I can’t convince myself that I deserve much sympathy. When I look honestly, I simply have too much to be grateful for. The second thing we can do to deepen our experience of gratitude is “widen our circle of compassion” by developing a bigger view of the world. I have watched almost no television since the late 1980’s. I don’t read a daily newspaper and I don’t read any mainstream magazines. The benefit is that my view of the world – and more importantly, of myself – is not being shaped by our society’s almost exclusive focus on two things: the rich and/or famous, and what’s not working in the world. The media keeps us constantly focused on who we aren’t, on what we don’t have, and on the disasters in our lives, our communities and the world. We are at a critical point in our human journey and the problems we face are complex. In the face of that, the mainstream media fails us in several ways. First, there is almost no reporting that focuses on the connection between our own day to day actions and the global problems we are facing – despite the fact that each one of those problems is the result of the choices that people like you and I are making every day. Second, there is virtually no coverage of the multitude of projects being created in every city across the globe – by people just like you and I – that are moving us towards a more humane and sustainable future. Instead, we are left with the sense that the problems are too big for us to understand or solve, that we are powerless. Seeing ourselves as “less than” is also one of the consequences of how large our world has become. When we lived in small tribal communities or villages, each of us had the opportunity to be known for something – to be special in some way. We each had had a skill or talent and so saw ourselves as an essential part of the community. These days, you aren’t a good business person unless you are Bill Gates, you aren’t a great athlete unless you go to the Olympics, you aren’t a good singer unless you sell a million records. We are constantly comparing ourselves to icons and finding ourselves wanting. When we stop looking through the lens shaped by the media, when we open our eyes and minds and begin to take in the actuality of the world around us, a new picture emerges. The vast majority of us are simple human beings struggling to find our way in the world – to build relationships, to support our families, to make a difference in the small circle in which we operate. Meg Wheatley, in her book about the importance of conversation (Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future), says that human beings everywhere want the same things – learning, freedom, meaning and love. Think about the people in your own life. I live in a small town in Northern California. Our circle of friends includes artists, craftspeople, nurses, teachers, lawyers, chefs and gardeners. Some are single, some married, and many have children. All of them are good people, striving to do the right thing and to contribute. Each one is unique, a gift in his or her own way. One of them started a gardening program at a local school. Another volunteers to coach two or three basketball teams every year. Some work on cleaning up local beaches and restoring the watershed. We all take care of one another’s children, help out when a parent is ill or out of town. When this local community of people is my lens, every one of us is a hero. In the United States we have sheltered ourselves from the reality of life for most people on the planet. Over a billion of us are starving. About 1.1 billion of us don’t have access to safe drinking water, and 2.6 billion lack even basic sanitation such as a pit latrine. Six million children die every year from diseases related to malnutrition, and twelve million parents grieve for them. In 2005, there were 39 armed conflicts across the globe. Millions of children are growing up amidst the daily threat of violence. When I expand out to this big view of the world, my perspective alters once again. From here, I am struck by the simple truth that if I am alive and I have enough food to eat, I have something to be grateful for. Gratitude grows out of a deep appreciation for what I have, and out of a deep knowing that many, many others struggle with things far beyond what you and I face in our day to day lives. It is not surprising that those who have faced the most difficult circumstances are often the most grateful. Knowing loss intimately has etched in them a profound awareness of what remains. Giving thanks is a practice, a practice that can become the foundation for our being in the world. What it takes is the willingness to shift our perspective, to “re-frame” our thinking. This kind of shift in perspective is available to us in every moment. Yes, life is full of challenges and struggles. That is a given. The question is always: how do we choose to respond? When I get stuck behind a slow driver, do a get frustrated and angry or do I let myself slow down and notice what a beautiful day it is? When I have to get up at 5:30 am for the fourth morning in a row to cook breakfast, do I complain about the terrible hours or do I remember how blessed I am to have work that I love so much? This isn’t about settling for something that isn’t working. That is a separate conversation. Dis-ease in our lives is a message to look at how we have structured things, to see how we could more deeply honor our selves. But even in the face of that awareness, there can be gratitude that we have the luxury to explore these questions. Because food is essential to our survival it can bring us deeply present to gratitude. The food we eat is our body’s source of nourishment, and our body is the vehicle that carries us through our lives and allows us to experience all of life’s wonders. The food we eat comes from the Earth and so our food reminds us that we are interdependent with the larger web of life. Food is also one of life’s pleasures, a source of sensual delight. Many of us grew up saying grace before meals but have given up this ritual as we’ve moved away from organized forms of religion. Saying grace is a wonderful opportunity to stop in our busy lives and notice all that we have. The food we eat keeps us alive so when we give thanks for the food on our table, we are literally giving thanks for our lives and for the gift of life itself. In the early days of my home delivery service the kitchen staff would gather at the beginning of each day in our small commercial kitchen in a Redwood canyon near the Russian River. Standing in a small circle, we would presence the Earth and thank her for the beautiful food she provided to us, we would thank the farmers whose labor had gone into growing the food, we would ask that the food nourish and bless our customers, and we would give thanks that we were lucky enough to have work that we found deeply meaningful. I’m ashamed to say that as we grew and the business become more complicated I somehow let that practice go. This points to the central challenge in giving thanks. It requires that we pause in the midst of our busy lives and notice what we have to be thankful for. To give thanks we have to open our eyes and our hearts to the gifts in our lives. There is no right way and no wrong way to give thanks. Gratitude is a practice. The more we do it, the more natural, frequent and heartfelt it becomes. If you have a desire to become more grateful for life’s gifts, you will create opportunities and rituals that work for you. Gratitude is the foundation for creating a life that is deeply meaningful, rich with relationship, and joyful. Giving thanks for our food, realizing our deep interconnectedness with the living Earth that supports us, can open this doorway. Exercises Make a list of everything in your life that you are thankful for, both tangible and intangible – an inventory of your gifts. At the end of every day, take a few minutes to think about or even write down five things that you were grateful for that day. Consider sharing them with a partner, your children, or a close friend. Create a “giving thanks” ritual for meal times. This could be as simple as a moment of silence to pause and notice that you are blessed to have food to eat. It might involve reading or speaking a blessing or prayer – a great resource is Earth Prayers From Around the World, edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon. Or each person gathered can each take a moment to presence something he or she is grateful for that day. Ask questions and talk about food while you are eating. What is the favorite food you ate today and why do you love that food? What are you eating that the Earth provided? Who and what can you thank for the food on your table? Learn more about the foods you eat. Where does this food grow and how? What does it look like in the garden? Is this food grown near where you live or does it come from somewhere else? What nutritional value does it have Questions 1. What does it mean to give thanks? 2. When I am in touch with gratitude, what opens up for me? How do I see the world? 3. How is food a gift? For me? For others in my life? For my community? On the planet? 4. Today, a billion of my fellow humans will go hungry. How do I keep this fact present for myself? How does being present to this knowledge impact my own choices? Resources Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer: An Approach to Life in Fullness. Brother David Steindl-Rast, New York: Paulist Press, 1984. Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal, Rachel Naomi Remen, New York: Riverhead Books, 1996. Life Prayers From Around the World: 365 Prayers, Blessings and Affirmations to Celebrate the Human Journey, edited by Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon, HarperSanFrancisco, 1996. Peace Prayers: Meditations, Affirmations, Invocations, Poems and Prayers for Peace, Harper San Francisco Staff, HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. Prayers for Healing: 365 Blessings, Poems and Meditations from Around the World, Larry Dossey, Conari Press, 2000.
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