If you follow my IG stories, then you know how I love to cook and romanticize my food. But two years ago, the only time you’d ever really find me in a kitchen was microwaving leftovers and heating up hot water for tea.
I hated food prepping. I wasn’t fond of grocery stores. I found the entire process way too time consuming. A majority of my account transactions were from eating out because I prioritized speed and convenience over health and wellness. Now, I consider grocery shopping and cooking as a sacred act and a practice that is so close to my heart. The new found love has gotten me through some of my darkest times this past year. It has also played a major role in helping me rest my analytical mind and come back home to myself. Cooking is a meditation.
It took me a while to come to terms with how much I love to cook. I spent a good portion of my 20s anxious about not being able to commit to one craft long enough to develop it into a skill. This anxiety came to revisit when I started to grow a more intimate relationship with cooking. I began to worry if it was distracting me from my small business—helping children of immigrants clarify their soul goals through meditation and intergenerational healing—that I had just began almost a year prior. It was the first time I had ever put consistent action towards a dream. I often get pulled towards different directions because I’m fascinated by many areas of life and mediums of art. I get the impulse to dive into all things that inspire me. I’ve also jumped out of things quickly after shaming myself for getting distracted—or rather, meaning making and labeling it as a distraction. I’ve realized after far too many shame attacks that it’s mainly the shame that holds me back, and not necessarily the multitude of interests.
Learning to cook has changed me—is changing me. Profoundly. Hand picking my ingredients this past year and developing a somatic relationship to cooking has truly taught me how to slow down before diving in; to take a beat before beginning and listen to my intuition. I’ve been paying closer attention to my nonhuman kinfolk—plants, animals, insects, the moon, trees, fungi. I sometimes envy how intuitive they are—they don’t have to think about anything, they just do, and we marvel at their beauty—that is until I recognize how I hold the same intuitive power that resides in them. My handpicked ingredients send me messages. They whisper things like: You don’t need a recipe. You don’t need to have it all planned out. Just listen, and then… begin.
Recently, I’ve grown a special kind of obsession for mushrooms and fungi. They have been reminding me of how we are all interconnected. How even my artistic interests are all interconnected. In an interview for Thrillist, chef and mushroom enthusiast, Sophia Roe speaks about her fascination with fungi: “What fungi teach me every day is symbiosis—how we just really need each other way more than we think. The mushroom gives the tree water, the tree gives this mushroom its home. There’s this kind of beautiful, ‘It needs me, I need it.’” The first year of building my business has felt lonely on many occasions. I’ve been unsure of where to turn when I’m low and have often felt that my emotional turmoil might be a burden to others. Not having my own sanctuary to come home to anymore has made me feel especially disconnected from myself, and at times this makes me crave solitude. Other times, I feel like I am just hungry for a community who is eager to hold me. One that says, Come, sit here and just rest. Be. You have nothing to explain. All your emotions are welcome. I yearn for the type of community fungi have created. I desire to be more like them in many ways. Roe continues:
I find all the different formats that fungi can present itself as a queendom to be really inspiring. Fungi are like, “Yeah I’m a yeast, but also I’m a mushroom, but also I’m some mold, but also I’m a protist, but also I’m a lichen.” It makes me want to push the boundaries of how I express myself. Like, yes, I am a chef, but what else am I? What else can I do? Am I just this one thing?
In the same way Roe began to ask herself these questions and push beyond the boundaries of self-expression, I did too. When I launched my business, it was the first time I ever felt like I had “a calling.” I had no idea what a calling even was until I found myself immersed in following mine. I had never felt this passionate about anything. I felt invincible during this time. But eventually my longest streak at working towards a major specific goal died. During the lull, a friend of mine asked me to write a poem for her wedding, and in the process of writing it, I rediscovered my love for poetry. This sparked great joy, but was then followed by deep confusion. What did I really want to do with my life? Why do I keep hopping from passion to passion? Why can’t I stick to one craft long enough to make it into a sustainable career?
The day before Thanksgiving, I went to six different marketplaces—five of them were specifically for wild mushrooms. I wanted as many different kinds as I could possibly get my hands on. As I prepped them the next day to make a Wild Mushroom Soup, it was clear to me that I was forming a serious bond with these mushrooms. I cut, peeled and caressed them with as much care and intention as I would give a newborn baby. I no longer just loved mushrooms. I was obsessed. I was passionate about something new… again. In Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Future by Merlin Sheldrake, the author writes: “A mycelial network is a map of fungus’s history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The ‘you’ of five years ago was made from different stuff than the ‘you’ of today.” One of my mentors always used to tell me, “Your problem is that you keep trying to get to an absolute.” And it was true. I’ve spent most of my life trying to define myself through some art form. What’s my thing? What’s my thing? What’s my thing? As I re-read “all life forms are in fact processes not things” over and over again, I felt a sense of peace wash over me, as I found purpose in merely existing. I stopped asking myself rigid questions that were rooted in shame and downloaded deep knowings that came from my Soul. I am not the ‘me’ five years ago. Five months ago. Five seconds ago. I am in a constant process. I am a vessel. I am fluid in my passions. And I must stop shaming myself for being a lover of many things and over analyzing my every step.
However, it’s a process of unlearning everything we’ve been taught under a violent system that glamorizes grind culture and has strategically marketed what “success” is supposed to look like—a system proposing that external factors such as labels, titles, verified blue check marks, achievements, etc. must be used to measure our worth. From the book Rest is Resistance, Nap Bishop, Tricia Hersey states:
“There is massive knowledge and wisdom lying dormant in our exhausted and weary bodies and hearts. I believe the dreaming part of our unraveling will be the most challenging because it goes against all we have been socialized to maintain, the pace and disconnection of grind culture.”
Like fungi, we must be able to dream up space for our conditioned and colonized minds to die so that we can resurrect and come alive again. Fungi teaches us how to heal. “It's impossible to look at regeneration without looking at decomposition and decomposition doesn't exist without fungi,” Giuliana Furci, the first female mycologist in Chile, shares on the podcast, For The Wild. There can be so much beauty after death. Literal and metaphorical. I had to allow what I initially thought my business was going to look like die in order to make space for new musings to come through and to begin formulating a new picture.
I know that one day I’ll find a way to combine my love for so many different arts—meditation, poetry, food, nature, etc. and present it to the world in a way that feels right to me. Without force. But for now, I’m just focused on relearning how to be with the process. Even though it’s been slow, it’s all unfolding. And I’m tired of being in a rush to have all the answers.
I surrender.
I surrender.
I surrender.
I’ve made space to slow down and rest, a lot, which has sparked so much more creativity. We can show up every day to do the work, and sometimes that work looks like doing absolutely nothing. Taking time to process. Listening. Bonding with mushrooms.
What I do know for sure is that, for me, cooking is so much deeper than making food to survive. Cooking is a somatic experience. It’s a relationship to food. It’s a sacred act where I do my best to make time to honor the farmers, the land and every entity it took to get the produce I was able to bring into my home. I really wanted to break celebrating the traditional thanksgiving this year—a holiday that is a horrifying reminder of the genocide and subjugation Indigenous folks suffered—by doing something out of the passive norm. So I chose to spend all day intuitively cooking and forming a deeper connection to a specific ingredient (mushrooms) as a way to honor the land. One day, I dream that our ceremonies on the fourth Thursday of November will look different. As for now, I am in awe of the work that is already being done. I have mushrooms to thank for the way I’ve chosen to pave my path to a new future, and for reminding me that my own existence, just like all life forms in nature, is also a beauty worth marveling at.