Cooking up Calm

Welcome.  Given that my intention is to help you come into better relationship with your fears, I thought I might employ imagination rather than explanation at this juncture.

Since fear is at the epicenter of our sorrows, If you can get authentically safe and calm this benefits everyone you love.

This blog post strives to serve as a virtual offering, one we might chew through together in our quest for something that can nourish us and our collective children… rippling perhaps from mind into tangible reality.

Okay, put on your imagination mind.  Let it drift down upon you like a warmed feather-bed comforter, rose petals falling over you as you recline on a secret bed in a magical castle, one where you can curl up safe and cozy for a brief story.

Now the door to your castle room opens and in steps a being so old that you can’t quite tell if it’s male or female—it is virtually both.  Yet they are vigorous and light glows warmly in their clear and loving eyes.  They take your hand, and it is as if you leave your body behind in the cozy bed and your spirit travels with this wise guide, their touch certain and yet soft.

They lead you along winding corridors to a wing of the castle you didn’t even know was there when you arrived.  You come upon an arching spiral stair that goes up as well as down.

Your wise old figure leads you up and up.  The stone steps are grooved and worn from your guide’s many trips up and down and, despite sun beaming in from the little windows, everything grows darker and darker.

Finally, you arrive at a heavy wooden door with a sun and a moon carved through it.  You find that you are holding a key and you turn the lock.  But when you look at your own hand upon the knob, you see that it is very old and you realize that as you have climbed the stairs, you have become as old as your guide; you are now sisters, brothers, anam cara (soul friends).

You enter a dark quiet room and together you gaze upon a child so young that it could still be in the womb.  You have traveled so far as to have arrived at the beginning.

The child is not frightened in the least, it wants for nothing.  The smile upon this child’s lips is otherworldly and you do not dare to disturb them.  You instinctively know that this is your true Self.  You also know that in some strange way you are one with your old friend and with this child.

Suddenly, you find yourself transported to the castle’s large comfy kitchen.  You are yourself again in age and the baby sleeps in your arms as you sit in a sturdy chair, watching the aged guide working at the oven and the stove, preparing something sacred.  You notice that the secret dish connects to your ethnicity, your tracings of cultural memory.  It may be bison if you have native American blood, or brisket if you’re Irish, lentils if your Indian… just notice whatever it is your wise old guide prepares.

You sit by the hearth and wait patiently, the lovely afternoon lingers while fingers of dappled light traverse the worn wooden floorboards and you are in no hurry, no wish to be anywhere but here.

Time has passed and the dish has melded.  Now your host serves up the food and the taste is a revelation—it is indescribable but perfect, just what your soul hungers for—a Madeline fit for Proust, the most evocative flavors of love and light.  This food fills you with tranquility.

You chew this sacrificial offering, this magical potion of your own deep wisdom, fully— adding consciousness to the meat or grain, releasing energy born only of light and dark, breaking through the final barriers that stand between your true and open Self and the fading tinges of fear and longing.

You feed the broth of this dish to the baby, helping them acclimate and integrate into this castle kitchen from which they may, in turn, enter more fully and consciously into your lived, day-to-day, world.

Next thing you know you are in your castle bedroom, almost asleep with the baby as your guide tucks you in and you drift off—and never is a nap so nice as with a calm sleeping baby on one’s chest.

When you awake from this netherworld you find yourself back in the embrace of your warm screen, the one that carries these now-mundane words of closure and ending.  Yet you carry the feeling of integration, calm and playful readiness to inhabit and explore our shared world—a world where we continually meet, learn from, and grow with, all the collective children of what turns out, in the end as in the beginning, to be endless reflections and permutations of our infinitely varied Self.

Meet us all free of fear, desire and judgment—and be kind to us all.  In this way we progress together.

Namaste, BD