I can pick through my words like fruit, choosing what’s ripe and ready –
I can order them meticulously, like mosaic tiles turning tiny chips of meaning into a shining image –
I can pack them like pipe bombs, full of all I know the world needs to explode what is wrong and leave peace in the ruins –
I, too, can listen and lay open my heart to the brushfire that burns, baptizes, and leaves me looking for you and a way to say, “I love you” in your language.
Walk into any professional kitchen and you will most likely find two things at a premium: knives and cutting boards. In fact, in many restaurants, it is customary for the chefs to provide their own knives. Practically, it means when you get a hold of a cutting board, you make the most of it – and you use it more than once. Of course, it has to be washed well if you are using it to prepare raw meat of some sort, but as far as veggies and bread and most other things, the way of the restaurant world is you wipe it clean between each action (or flip it over) and keep working on your next project. Whatever the task, it works best when you clean your work area of whatever you were working on before and then move on to the next thing.
How nice it would be if life were so easily segmented.
A chance to submit a piece of writing this week brought with it the residue of relationships and the trace elements of insecurity that somehow seem connected to much of life (at least for me) and have set me to thinking how I might clean my board, so to speak, so I can make a clean offering to the project. Perhaps it begins with finding a new metaphor.
Soup making is a regular activity in our kitchen. I love making soups mostly, I think, because it means seeing what new thing can come from things that already exist. Our soups, for the most part, are made from what we have on hand; other than some dried beans, we don’t order anything exclusively to make soup. After brunch on Sunday, for example, I set aside the last of the pinto beans (along with some extra we made), the salsa fresca, some caramelized onions, and some sautéed poblano peppers to become our soup for tonight. All I have to do is add some vegetable stock (our beans are vegetarian – I’ll keep them that way for the soup), adjust the seasonings, and puree the mixture and we will have something wonderful to offer our customers made from the things we carry, if you will.
Granted, the leftovers of life don’t always offer such a flavorful recipe, but the creative tension that lies between cleaning the board and making the best of what is left appears to be the path I’m pulled to walk in these days, if I wish to do more than let my insecurities get the best of me. And I wish. I want to clear out those things capable of turning toxic and hang on to all the tasty tidbits that add flavor to what I have to say. Sometimes those are easier to distinguish in the kitchen than they are in the rest of my life.
One of the lessons I learned from one of my chef mentors is you make soup ahead of time. You don’t, for instance, make tonight’s soup this morning. The bean soup I’ll finish today will be for tomorrow night or Thursday. We have a chilled carrot soup with orange and mint I made on Sunday that has been waiting to debut today. A little time lets the flavors marry to become what they want to be together, rather than merely a collection of ingredients. A good soup takes time, and patience. When we heat it up to serve, I will check the seasoning balance again to see how they have matured together, what they have become given some time.
Sometimes our insecurities get the best of us (and by us, I mean me) in situations seasoned too heavily with history. I struggle when I feel pulled back into who I was, rather than who I am in these days. Growing into wholeness as a human being requires some of the same sense of timing and patience as soup making, it seems; rechecking the seasoning and the ingredients added to my life along the way will help me remember who I am and who I have become, even as I step back into a context that connects to who I was. Growing into that same wholeness requires I clean the board, if I am to make an honest offering, and wipe away what is not healthy or useful and get to going on the work at hand in the context of the relationships as they are in these days, not as what they once were.
The best cooking is simple. By simple, I don’t mean quick or expedient, but well-chosen ingredients prepared in a simple, patient, and straightforward way that allows them to, well, be themselves. When we were in Turkey a few years back, my favorite dish was made of eggplant, tomatoes, onions, parsley, and olive oil. That was it – and it was amazing. Life, perhaps, is the same way. I have an invitation to write, which I love to do. I have a chance to lean back into an old friendship to find something new. The call, then, is for me to work in the same simplicity, patience, and straightforwardness and trust that it, too, will be a flavorful offering.
In life, most days, it’s not so much what happens as it is what we notice, what we choose to remember and carry with us.
A week or two ago, I noticed Julia Cameron’sThe Writing Diet on the shelf at Barnes and Noble. She is the author of The Artist’s Way, a book that has been significant to me at several different junctures of my life, so I browsed through this new (to me) book and was intrigued, since she speaks to me and I’m carrying around more weight than I want to. I chose to come back to our neighborhood bookstore, The Regulator, to have them order it for me, so I didn’t get it until late last week.
One of the key components to her approach to both art and losing weight is something she calls “morning pages.” No real mystery. The name says what it is: get up in the morning and write, first thing, three pages of whatever comes out and then go on about your day. What I learned before, when I wrote every morning as I began to come to terms with my depression and as I have written now for about a week, is my early morning scribbling is a living prompt, in the same way I’ve been given writing prompts in classes over the years: a call to pay attention.
Interesting phrase, isn’t it? Pay attention.
I must pay attention in the same way, perhaps, that I paid the man at the bookstore for my inspiring little volume – give something up for something I want. If I want to pay attention to life as it happens around me, it’s going to cost me. And it’s going to pay off in ways I seldom am able to imagine. Which leads me back to my opening sentence: in life, most days, it’s not so much what happens as it is what we notice, what we choose to remember and carry with us.
I clicked over to YouTube tonight, in search of a video we had talked about at work today and found a selection of four short films from the National Film Board of Canada (gotta love those Canadians) that were competing at the Cannes Film Festival. They range in length from about two and a half minutes to a little over nine, all of them incredibly well made and imaginative. As I watched, I began to think of all the love and work and play and art and sweat and struggle and joy and hope and despair and determination that went into each of these projects, knowing full well they would only be seen by a relatively small group of people. You don’t get famous making two-minute movies.
But you can tell a great story.
And, when you find someone telling a great story you should pay attention long enough to suggest to everyone you can that they might do the same.
I’ve spent two days this week with the folks from Bountiful Backyards working on turning our front yard, which is shaded by a hundred year old pin oak, from the scraped landscape it was
into something both beautiful and useful. They brought in edible, medicinal, sustainable, and native plants to give our yard a new look and new life.
Next week, the finish touch will be to inoculate the wood chips around the tree with oyster and golden mushroom spores to create a mushroom bed.
I’m tired of hauling wood chips and I’m very excited about what we have set in motion.
Ginger called me from the Festival of Homiletics today after hearing Craig Barnes because she wanted to pass along something he said (and I’m writing it as I remember it, not as a direct quote): “Preachers are ‘minor poets,’ which is to say they speak a particular truth to a particular people.” The point is not to speak to everyone in the world, but to speak a truth that will matter to those in the room with you. His definition of “minor poet” led me to some poetry reading of my own before I go to work at the restaurant for the evening.
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
The only thing I would say to Barnes, other than, “Nice work,” is whether major or minor, it seems to me poets find far-reaching truths by revealing what they see in the small world in front of their faces. Though kindness may change the world, for instance, we begin by remembering it ties our shoes.
And gives me grace to find meaning in the evening that lies in front of me.
The end of my shift yesterday marked the first time in eleven days (and thirteen shifts) that I had a day off to look forward to. In fact, if I count the hours from the time I got off work until I have to go back tomorrow afternoon, I had forty-eight of them to do with as I pleased. Treasure, I tell you. Pure gold.
The landscape of my leisure has led me from one gathering to another; I have traversed my city finding friends. (Ginger’s out of town.) Last night, I sat on the porch of Parker and Otis listening to bluegrass music and sharing wine and cheese (thanks, Cherry) as I watched this little girl who was wearing a bow as big as her face dance with total abandon. She was awesome. Then there was the little guy standing next to his mom at the cash register when I went in to get more food who had azure blue eyes as big as quarters and wanted me to see the candy-filled car he had found while his mom was shopping. When she saw the car she spoke to him in German and I thought, “Man, this kid is three and already speaks more languages than I do.”
I got home about eight-thirty to feed pups and spend some time with them, but I had a promise to keep. One of the servers I work with at the restaurant also tends bar at The Green Room, a pool hall across the parking lot from our eating establishment and as we have left work for the last several days he has said, “Come by and let me buy you a beer.” So, about ten o’clock I walked the block to the bar and gladly accepted a Shiner Bock. Another person from the restaurant came in looking for someone to shoot pool and, since I had the next day off, I was happy to oblige.
This is no ordinary pool hall. It is a Durham institution, going back to Prohibition, and has this sign posted on the front door:
No — misbehaving — drinks on tables — beverages in or out — facist regimes — poor sportsmanship
And they welcome pets. There were three large dogs, unleashed and inquisitive, working the room the whole time I was there. The setting was completely different from the folks on the porch and yet, when I sat back and watched the groups of people playing pool and shuffleboard, or just sitting at the bar, the dynamic was the same: they had come to be together.
I got up this morning and took Ella, our youngest Schnauzer and lover of ALL people, to the Durham Farmers’ Market. She loves seeing all the people and dogs that gather to buy and sell everything from local produce to baked goods to chocolate. I let her make her rounds and then asked her to wait in the car while I bought some food. I’ve gotten to know a few people there. Some are suppliers for our restaurant. One woman sold me most of the heirloom tomato plants in my garden. Another makes awesome cheese. One of the guys I work with at the catering kitchen helps out one of the artisan bakers and made the lamb chorizo in the homemade empanadas (don’t think I didn’t bring that home for lunch). I bought some fresh ground pork and kielbasa from a young girl (working with her mom) who had all the confidence of a young Broadway star and appeared to love all the people as much as Ella.
I brought Ella home and wandered back downtown for the Bimbe Cultural Arts Festival, one of Durham’s traditions I have not yet participated in. Again, people were gathered together, this time around African dance and drumming and, of course food, which ran more along the festival and carnival menu than ethnic. I saw the Only Burger truck and my decision was made. Brian, the owner, is someone I had met previously, so he and I had a nice chat as his crew made my burger. I went back over to the stage area and shared a table with five elderly women who were happy to let me sit down, mostly because they wanted to know where I got my burger.
My morning shopping set me to imagining dinner (and this new recipe) once I got back home from the festival, which set me to whom I might gather around my dinner table. After all, this blog is called “Don’t Eat Alone.” I called Lori and Terry and they joined me for dinner. And a good time was had by all.
Tomorrow, in the hours I have left before I go back to work, I’ll head to church where, once more, I will be with a group of intentional gatherers, people I mean to be with. My peeps, as the kids say. (Those crazy kids.) Thank God.
In our work-a-day world, it’s far too easy to believe that the rhythm of life is akin to the opening verse of Jackson Browne’s “The Pretender”:
I’m going to rent myself a house in the shade of the freeway I’m going to pack my lunch in the morning and go to work each day and when the evening rolls around I’ll go back home and lay my body down and when the morning light comes streaming in I’ll get up and to it again amen
Amen, translated, means, “So be it.” Well, no. (Which is actually Browne’s point, as well, I might add.) The melodies that rolled out of the mandolins on the porch at P & O and the beat of the drums in downtown Durham sing a different song, as does the jukebox at The Green Room and the couple playing and singing on the grass at the farmers’ market and the hymns we will sing in the morning, and it is a gathering song. If we listen to our hearts and the rhythm of all creation (rocks crying out, trees applauding) the song we know best is one rich in harmonies, one that calls us together in whatever groups we can gather, for whatever reason we can imagine.
Now – amen. So be it.
Peace, Milton
P. S. — An added bonus. Here’s Jackson Browne talking about the song and singing it.
It was a dark and stormy afternoon and I was trapped in the Barnes and Noble by a thunderstorm. Ginger was on the other end of the Streets of Southpoint looking for shoes. Since I had the time, I migrated upstairs to the poetry section to see what I could see. There I found a teenage Latina girl who was planted in front of the poetry books and so deeply engrossed in what she was reading that she didn’t even see me when I took my place in front of the bookshelf next to her and opened a book of invitations of my own. Neither of us spoke or acknowledged one another; we simply shared the space the poems made for us there on the second floor.
We were both deep into our poems when three other girls descended on the young poet like pigeons on breadcrumbs, barraging her with Spanish I didn’t understand. I assumed they had come to tell her it was time to go, or that the rain had stopped. Then one of them asked, “What are you reading?”
“Poems,” she said. And for the first time she looked at me, perhaps to know someone understood.
More Spanish, and then the older of the three intruders grabbed the book out of her hand and said, “You don’t need to read poems,” finishing her thought in Spanish.
The girl grabbed the book back and answered, “Yes, I do. They talk about love and yearning.” The others shrugged her off and turned to walk away. She put the book back on the shelf and began to follow, but not without asking, rhetorically, “What do you want me to do – just get a job and make money everyday?”
My chance encounter fell in the middle of an eleven-day-thirteen-shift stretch for me at work in a frame of my mind that has me examining what meaning I am making of my life these days. Reading and writing far too easily gives way to prepping and cooking; I spend much more of my life with pots and pans rather than poetry. I love cooking, I like my job, and I would like to spend my time differently, proportionally, than life affords me the opportunity to do in these days.
The last paragraph has less to do with existential crisis than with the desire, to borrow words from a biblical poet, Paul, to “make the most of the time.” As long as I’m borrowing words, I’ll turn to a poet and recent acquaintance, Justin McRoberts and one of the songs he sang at the Writer’s Conference in Jackson a couple of weeks ago:
you see the question isn’t are you going to suffer any more but what will it have meant when you are through the question isn’t are you going to die, you’re going to die but will you be done living when you do
What the poets know is life adds up to more than the sum of the parts. A poet who has befriended me with her words over the years is Naomi Shihab Nye who wrote a poem in response to a student coming up to her at a workshop, handing her a piece of paper with his address on it, and asking her to write a poem and send it to him.
Valentine for Ernest Mann
You can’t order a poem like you order a taco. Walk up to the counter and say, “I’ll take two” and expect it to handed back to you on a shiny plate.
Still, I like you spirit. Anyone who says, “Here’s my address, write me a poem,” deserves something in reply. So I’ll tell a secret instead: poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes, they are sleeping. They are the shadows drifting across our ceilings the moment before we wake up. What we have to do is live in a way that lets us find them.
Once I knew a man who gave his wife two skunks for a valentine. He couldn’t understand why she was crying. “I thought they had such beautiful eyes.” And he was serious. He was a serious man who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly just because the world said so. He really liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them as valentines and they became beautiful. At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding in the eyes of skunks for centuries crawled out and curled up at his feet.
Who knows what the days ahead hold for any of us. Here’s what I do know: I want my life to be about poetry more than paychecks. I want to live in the middle of the skunks and the storms and still have the wherewithal to notice who is standing beside me at the next bookshelf, who I come home to, and, whether I spend the rest of my days cooking or writing, do more than get a job and make money, even though I need both.
