how to cook your life

Tonight I was chatting with McCabe and she related that in a class she’d taken, a teacher had told the class: “This class is going to bring up all your shit, and it’s going to be the best thing that has ever happened to you.”

Or something like that, loosely paraphrased.

And I wanted to get that printed on t-shirts, because when I’ve got my “shit” coming up, I generally don’t think that it’s the best thing that has ever happened to me. I get really attached to the way I want it to be, and that way is always the easy way. I mean, I can almost hear myself whining as I type this. Why can’t it be eaaaaaassssyyyyy?

But quite frequently life brings up all of our shit, and it’s the best thing that ever happens to any of us.

And then after this I was sitting on the couch eating brown rice and wild rice with steamed green beens (because, if you must know, between reading Fast Food Nation and seeing the movie version and seeing Super Size Me and watching Food, Inc., it just is not sitting right for me to eat processed food anymore, from an environmental, ethical, health and human rights perspective, which is going to be a serious killjoy for me when I want to sit down for my Tuesday night ritual and watch The Biggest Loser while eating a Frosty from Wendy’s, and I don’t have any plan for how I’m going to shift this but green beans and brown rice are a start, and they were quite tasty…) and I was eating dinner and watching How to Cook Your Life, a documentary about Ed Espe Brown, writer of the Tassajara Bread Book and Zen practitioner. I was staying at Green Gulch Zen Center on a retreat a few years ago and had the good fortune of having some of his bread because he happened to be there at the same time.

And oh my god this is good bread.

I still remember this bread.

But I was watching this documentary tonight and there were shots of Green Gulch and I was remembering my time there. And then Ed Brown starts talking about how life brings up all of our shit (only he of course didn’t say “shit”), how cooking can be like a metaphor for life in so many ways. Cooking = timing, patience, our morals and values around affluence, care, tenderness, practice, integrating the body, being present to what is before us. Cooking, as he explains it, brings up all of our desires to enforce our will, to overthink it, to control, to run up against discouragement when things go wrong.

Because things will go “wrong.” And I’m constantly forgetting that and re-remembering. Things will go “wrong.” Life is going to edge up against me all over the place, against all of us, and it’s going to be uncomfortable as hell.

It’s only our stories that tell us that there’s something “wrong” with discomfort that make discomfort so…discomforting.

And I’m the weirdo, I guess, because I like watching documentaries where people chop vegetables and liken that to life.

In this documentary, every story and every sentence was phrased with carefulness, and yet I couldn’t help but think that what Ed Brown says and what McCabe’s teacher once said are basically the same.

So I’ll rephrase it a bit:

“Life is going to bring up all of your shit, and it’s going to be the best thing that has ever happened to you.”

I love it.