YOU’RE THE COOK
Making your love manifest, transforming your spirit, good heart, and able hands into food is a great undertaking, one that will nourish you in the doing, in the offering, in the eating. No one but you can do this: turning what is invisible inside into fragrant aromas and nourishing flavors. Books and classes will teach you to follow instructions so that you can learn some basics and possibly reproduce someone else’s masterpieces. Coming to your senses and knowing for yourself what’s what is your task, an ongoing journey that will have its crests and valleys, its successes and fiascoes, as well as the sweetest fulfillment—food at the table with warmhearted companions.
You’re the Cook
You’re the cook.
SUZUKI ROSHI
When I initially assumed my position as head cook (tenzo) at the fledgling Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in May of 1967, my new coworkers informed me that “we do not use salt here.” Really? “Yes,” they proclaimed all-knowingly, “salt is bad for you.” I was at a loss what to do. To avoid conflict, should I accede to their understanding that salt is bad for you, even though no evidence was presented, or use salt and weather the consequences? I called on a higher authority and went to see Suzuki Roshi in his cabin at Tassajara.
“You’re the cook,” Roshi clarified in his soft yet decisive manner. “You can use salt if you want.” What a relief: it would be okay to cook.
So many beliefs, so many understandings come and go, hold sway, enthrall and captivate, lose momentum. Salt is bad for you, yet macrobiotics believe in eating lots of salt, miso, and soy sauce. Some people trumpet eating only raw vegetables and fruits; others say only cooked vegetables. There are meat-eaters, vegetarians, not just vegetarian but vegans, fat phobic, fat appreciative, allergic, sensitive, intolerant, dairy approving, no dairy allowed, spicy, and plain. And this is not even mentioning comfort food versus the latest fad—excuse me, haute cuisine, where food is architectural, turned into froths, or goes molecular. Not to mention assembly by elves under a magnifying glass. Or maybe that’s over now. All well and good—I love that people devote themselves to their craft, though I choose not to keep up with what they are doing or with the prices they charge.
When you are home in your kitchen, you’re the cook, so you decide. Perhaps you feel confident, or possibly you sense a minefield of preferences and standards, science and circus, claims and counterclaims. Perhaps the voices argue back and forth in your head, as though in a courtroom battle: judge, jury, prosecutor, defense attorney, witnesses. The trial proceeds without end. Appeals are mounted. New evidence presented, and still you’re the cook. Some people will like what you cook; other people won’t. When you try to please everyone, you will still displease many.
When people come to my cooking classes, I ask them to please try out practicing cutting skills and other techniques that I share. I ask them to taste carefully, ingredient by ingredient, and let me decide how to season the various dishes we prepare. And then I remind them, “When you get home, remember that you’re the cook, and you decide how to do things, which ingredients to prepare, and how to season the food.”
When I was first cooking at Tassajara, I received complaints that the oatmeal was too thick: “In the morning our digestion is still sluggish and we need something easy to digest, so the oatmeal needs to be soft and liquidy and cooked a long time.” Okay. Understood.
When the oatmeal was thinner (and thoroughly cooked), another group of people protested: “We’re digging a septic tank by hand; we’re hauling rocks. Since we’re not eating meat, at least we could have oatmeal that you can chew.” Okay. Got it.
Once I put raisins in the oatmeal. Yet another contingent entered the fray with angry denunciations: “Why are you poisoning everyone?” The macrobiotics were convinced that sugar was poisonous, even in the form of dried fruit, and if you followed their diet plan, you would be calm and peaceful. Raisins apparently were not in the plan. Doing your best is still not a recipe for pleasing everyone.
In Zen we say, “Follow a true teaching, while keeping your awareness open for something better, and if you find something better, then follow that.” It turns out that the point is to honor your own aesthetic and to be open to having your aesthetic shift, grow, and change. Your aesthetic is something personal, yours, inside. It does not come from opinions, articles, or cookbooks. Something inside says, “Yes,” and you concur, “By all means.” Your work is to clarify your aesthetic—which often means seeing through your own childhood preferences—express it, trust it, and cultivate it without sticking to anything, without any evidence, without any credentials. Of course you listen to others and consider their perspective, and then, true to yourself, on you go, endlessly. Often you have something to learn. Okay, you say, “I’ll try that out.”
Trusting Your Aesthetic
Your aesthetic is something alive—sometimes said to be formed at conception, in utero, birth, or childhood—organically shaped first by your early life experiences and then informed and reformed by new experiences that you receive openly with interest and curiosity. You continue tasting new foods and fresh dishes. You listen to others. You entertain their views (which may often curiously be like sales pitches), but you don’t have to buy in immediately. Instead, you can say, simply, “Thank you, good to know. I’ll keep that in mind.”
Over time many taste experiences will continue to shape your aesthetic. You learn to trust your felt sense because you know for yourself, not because you have the arguments ready to defend it. When you find yourself resorting to arguments, that’s not an aesthetic. That’s a head trip, where your mental body is busy hijacking the agenda—for better or worse.
For Zen practitioners, one’s aesthetic is commonly considered to be located in the hara, about three finger-widths below your navel—which is loosely analogous to the second chakra. The second chakra is widely considered the seat of the felt sense. To trust your hara or felt sense, you will frequently need to disregard what everyone is saying, even what your own head is saying, as well as much of what you previously learned. Ours is a culture that believes in what the head says and that you advance in life by following the directives that come from above, from the realm of thinking. It is a culture that believes you could argue out what is right and browbeat others into following along. So learning to listen to and trust your felt sense, or your aesthetic (rather than your thinking), is a huge and important shift in awareness.
Step by step, taste by taste, you come to know that there is nothing outside this—your careful experiencing. As my Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi often repeated, pointing first to his head and then to his hara, “Zen is to settle the self on the self.” As it was a verbal teaching, we never found out whether that second self below the navel had a capital S or a small one.
How You See Cooking
See cooking as a chore or a waste of time, and you will find the task tedious—so tiresome that you will probably not even get into the kitchen! See cooking as an opportunity to develop new skills, to learn as you go, to nourish and feed yourself, family, and friends, and your activity in the kitchen will likely flourish. Shift from your head to your heart and hands, your body and being, and you will tend to discover connection, a home ground for purifying your love, moments of meeting the Beloved, and opportunities for further renewal. What are you doing with your life? How will you choose to see things?
Cooking Is Not Just Cooking
Cooking is not just cooking.
You’re working on yourself.
You’re working on others.
SUZUKI ROSHI
It’s not always so. It may be so, but it’s not always so.
SUZUKI ROSHI
Often we characterize activities with all-embracing designations. Cooking is tiresome. Meditation is boring. Psychedelics are mind-altering. Surfing is a blast. Rock climbing is invigorating. A massage is relaxing. Sex is heavenly. Whatever we characterize with blanket descriptions, Suzuki Roshi reminded us, “It’s not always so.”
At least as important as the activity itself is what we implicitly bring with us when we move into action: the way we see the world and how we go about doing things. Yes, we take to some activities and not to others. Yet one most basic point of emphasis in Zen (and Buddhism) is that when we think our happiness depends on manipulating our activities to maximize the pleasurable ones and minimize those we find unpleasant, we will suffer. Because it’s an inherently flawed strategy—it cannot be accomplished. The dishes remain unwashed and continue to stare back at you.
As you attempt to increase the positive moments and decrease the negative ones, you put yourself in the passive position of being powerless as experiences inflict themselves upon you. How then will you stand your ground with some strength and equanimity, digesting the various moments of your life?
The important shift here is to value the darkness as well as your capacity to develop skills to handle whatever the moment brings and to get to work—or start cooking, as it were. In other words, work means not just work in the world. You will also be working on how you see things, on what kind of effort you make, on whether or not you persevere. The activity is not in charge. You are. You have choice.
Sure, sometimes you turn to do something else. Yet other times you get to work, you work through it, you see it through, and in the process, you undergo transformation.
If cooking is “tiresome,” then while you are thinking that “this cooking is tiresome,” you will probably not notice any of the aspects of cooking that might be engaging, beautiful, or energizing. You will probably cook in a repetitive manner, completing assigned tasks without any sense of curiosity or discovery, without truly engaging your life-force energy, without understanding how to bring your body and spirit alive in the kitchen. In other words, cooking will be tiresome because you are doing it in a tiresome way. You’re only putting in your time until you can get to somewhere your awareness can be carried along, or if all goes well, swept away. Often then, when you return to the rest of your life, it can seem even grayer—because you still have more to learn about how to meet and engage the ingredients of life.
If meditation is “boring,” who said that? Who must be busy looking elsewhere for more energizing experiences rather than entering more deeply into the moment as it is? Who is not finding the way to connect what is inside with what is outside and instead is wishing for salvation or escape, whether it be in the form of the proverbial sex, drugs, and rock and roll or the allures of entertainment or enlightenment? Who is it that prefers something big and powerful to provide a sense of flight (or at least height) to coming to a standstill and having to be with oneself? And who might agree to work with this seemingly inadequate self? With careful examination, perhaps you realize that you are a great candidate for this work of re-parenting yourself, of becoming your own best friend.
Boredom can be a precursor to more intimately engaging with the present moment. Instead of busily dismissing the moment with a condescending, “Hey, meditation, you don’t do it for me,” you shift to, “What more can I find out? Is there something I’m missing? Tell me more.” You open, or allow, for something bigger.
While you are busy being bored—that is, not finding the excitement and stimulation you are looking for—often you will not be noticing how much you are abandoning yourself in the process. While you are busy looking elsewhere, what is apparent is not yet realized. Realization is everywhere. And you? Where are you spending your time? Daydreaming about being elsewhere? Or digging in and finding the black dragon jewel exactly here.
Naturally we find some activities uplifting and others troublesome, but we will discover more freedom for ourselves when we do not make universal statements that leave us out of the equation. When we realize that the things we do are not just things but our behavior, then we may also realize we have the power to change our life by changing the way we do things rather than what we do.
I know that changing what we do—breaking out of unsatisfying relationships or leaving jobs that don’t value our gifts—can also be an important life task, but when it’s our only option, we’re probably limiting our choices. Wherever you go, there you are, so finally, we’re deciding if where we are is a good place to work on our problems, to develop new skills or tools, or “to have the right kind of trouble.” Finding the space where you can learn and grow, entering the space where you can belong rather than just fit in means that your life can go forward. You are bringing the sacred alive.
Baking bread may seem like it’s too much work, but as one of my students once shared, “Baking bread seemed like a way to reown my life from corporate America.”
Giving Voice to What Is Inside
Connecting what is inside with what is outside, the inner world with the outer one, is the work of a lifetime, work that is often carried on deep beneath the surface of a world of surfaces.
In outer reality, where images loudly shout their self-importance and claim undue amounts of attention, where will you choose to put your attention? On crafting your image? Or working with the ingredients you’re given, doing what you came here to do?
Suzuki Roshi would ask us to discover, “What is your inmost request?” Still I continue to study how to awaken ears to hear what is most intimate, to listen to the oceanic silence within. That I may follow that innermost unspoken resolve. That I may give it voice. Giving voice to our inmost request is pivotal for giving it life. Then we can make it real for all the world to see. Then the world comes forward to meet your inner vow.
Over the years, I have found one inmost request after another—and often my practice has been to work on these intentions in the kitchen:
I want to learn how to bake bread and teach others how.
I want to feel simply and reliably okay about being here, being at home here. Whether or not I have problems or difficulties.
I wish for intimate connection with others, with food, with the work at hand.
I long to sense what is sacred, calm, clear, and precious.
I want to stand my ground. Speak my truth.
I will learn to love myself, others, and the world the way I have always wanted to be loved.
Spiritual work in this context means giving voice to what is innermost and connecting that to the outer world. We are called to be even larger-hearted than we could possibly imagine. Loving what is less than perfect. Let’s get on with it, shall we?