‘Everything we encounter is our life’: Finding Ourselves in the Food We Eat

“Apparently in olden days in China the rice polishing process was not very efficient, and there were a lot of tiny pebbles mixed in with the rice. The first thing the tenzo had to do was pick the tiny stones out of the rice before it was cooked. In this respect there can be no doubt that food fit for human consumption lies at the point where the rice has been distinguished from the stones. So, in our daily lives, we have to discriminate, but what we must not forget is the fundamental attitude grounding this discrimination: everything we encounter is our life. This is the attitude of Big Mind.”

– Kōshō Uchiyama Roshi, “How to Cook Your Life”

“The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature” (1836)

Before I came to Houston, I had been living – for several years – in places where nature and the natural world seemed intimately close at hand, where what Emerson describes as our “intercourse with heaven and earth” seemed much easier to make a part of my own “daily food” and daily life. Houston, by contrast, seemed like an endless concrete slab that went on for an eternity in every direction, hot and humid and overdeveloped.

My feelings have mellowed over the years. Part of that was learning to see the massive, sprawling city as more than just a monolith – which meant spending time on the street in different parts of town, exploring, investigating, trying new things, and seeing what the city and its many vibrant cultures and neighborhoods had to offer.

Another big part of learning to love a place – as obvious as it may sound – is learning to love and appreciate some of the people who live there and call it home. That can be a challenge in a big city, where it’s easy to feel anonymous and alone, despite the crowded streets and the traffic jams. But the more you take the time to look, the more you learn to see just how many extraordinary characters make up the human landscape all around you.

When you take the time to look around, you also can’t help seeing all the people doing good work in the service of others, like the folks at A 2nd Cup, a local nonprofit and coffee shop with a mission to battle the evils of human trafficking – a big issue in Houston, as, unfortunately, in many places in the world today. They’ve got their work cut out for them, but they’re fighting a good fight, and doing it in some creative ways, educating legislators and the public, raising awareness, and directly supporting trafficking victims through partnerships and outreach efforts.

A seat at the Brazen Table

I had the chance recently to attend a cooking class organized by A 2nd Cup as a fundraiser for their Brazen Table program, which works with trafficking survivors to teach them practical, marketable culinary skills that can open the door to work in the restaurant and hospitality industry (as well as serve them throughout their lives). It’s just one more way they’re working to transform the culture and to support and empower those in need.

During the class, we prepared a beautiful, delicious American Farm-to-Table menu under the guidance of a young chef whose own personal odyssey has so far taken her to train at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, to foraging and cooking and studying nutrition in Colorado, to distant lands and foreign tables, and now back to Houston, where she continues her studies and is using her voice, as a chef and a teacher, to advocate for health, nutrition, sustainable community farming, and great food. It was an inspiring experience.

It was also a reminder to me that every one of us is on a journey, some odyssey or another, that is shaping and strengthening us, preparing us – we hope – to do something beautiful and meaningful in the world and in the lives of the people we meet along the way.

I’ve never been any great maestro in the kitchen – give me a piano and a microphone, or a pen and paper any day. But, once upon a time, I used to really enjoy cooking – honest-to-goodness cooking, with ingredients to be prepared and more than just the instructions on the back of a box to guide me.

I’ve done a lot less cooking in recent years, and it’s not always easy for me to say why. Maybe I felt others would always do it better than I ever could. Maybe my incessant need to be good at things kept me from practicing something I enjoyed but wasn’t outstanding at. Maybe I lost my beginner’s mind and never got it back. Maybe I got busy. Maybe I got lazy. Or maybe I just got old and lost the sense of fun I used to have in tossing a few things together into a pot and seeing what might become of it all, what glorious meal or madness might ensue.

Most likely, it was some combination of them all.

But over the course of the past year or so – ever since my mom’s illness and death forced me to step back and reexamine what’s really important in life – I’ve been learning to take my health and well-being more seriously. That journey has led me to try and find more ways to get outside and reconnect with nature, but I’ve also found myself thinking a lot more about what I eat and about how I approach food in general. That development has led me, tentatively, back into the kitchen, where I have discovered that I have a lot to learn.

Learning to appreciate ‘the scenery of your life’

Living in a big city like Houston, it can be hard to feel connected to the earth, to feel grounded and to retain that ancient sense of fundamental interconnectedness with nature and the environment. But when we eat – and especially when we eat mindfully and choose what we eat with care and wisdom – then we’re never more than a moment – or a mouthful – away from everything that is. I’ve been searching for ways to rekindle my sense of connection with the natural world, and the cooking class helped me realize that the food we eat can be a part of that connection. I can’t believe I didn’t see that clearly before.

In the same section of “How to Cook Your Life” quoted above, Kōshō Uchiyama Roshi quotes from the original Tenzo Kyokun (or “Instructions for the Zen Cook”), where Dōgen writes:

“Having a Magnanimous Mind means being without prejudice and refusing to take sides. When carrying something that weighs an ounce, do not think of it as light, and likewise, when you have to carry fifty pounds, do not think of it as heavy. Do not get carried away by the sounds of spring, nor become heavy-hearted upon seeing the colors of fall. View the changes of the seasons as a whole, and weigh the relativeness of light and heavy from a broad perspective.”

Much could be said about taking the changes of the seasons in stride, but Uchiyama goes on in his commentary to elaborate on it in a way that I find pretty helpful.

“Usually, pound and ounce are thought of as units of weight. This metaphor means, however, that you should not be swayed by the values of society nor get all excited simply because it is spring—finding yourself in favorable circumstances. Likewise, just because it is fall, there is no need to get all upset and have a nervous breakdown. Rather, see the four seasons of favorable circumstances, adversity, despair, and exaltation all as the scenery of your life. This is what lies behind the expression Big Mind.”

So, “everything we encounter is our life,” and seeing whatever may come – light or heavy, pleasant or unpleasant – as being part of “the scenery of your life” sounds like a reasonable, if not necessarily easy, way to approach the ups and downs we encounter in our own existence.

Today’s menu: ‘fresh and local’

It can be hard to feel at peace – to “be still and know” – when life keeps pulling the rug out from underneath you. It can be hard to find our way in the world when the landscape around us keeps shifting and changing and we feel like too much of life is out of our control. Learning to reconnect with silence and the deep, ancient truths – like the lessons taught by Chuang Tzu’s useless old tree – can be helpful, to be sure. But there’s more than one way to practice the art of presence. One way that we all have available to us every day, at least to some extent, is through food. Our food can, if we allow it, be one of the most intimate connections we have, not just to the people we love and care about, but also to nature, our environment, and the whole world around us.

Thinking about food this way can, I suspect, teach us something vital about life and the delicate art of living well through all its ups and downs. What’s more, cooking with fresh, local, natural foods as much as possible means cooking with the seasons, in touch with the rhythms of all life on earth. It means learning to be aware of the natural world around you and knowing that there is indeed “a time for everything under heaven.”

And this understanding can spill over into how we live. After all, when it comes to the experience of living, to really savoring everything life has to offer, “fresh and local” is pretty much all we’ve got. The past is stale and overdone, and the future is much too far away and insubstantial to nourish us in the here and now.

Maybe, when you begin to cook – to live – in this way, then you really begin to “cook your life.” And to realize that, no matter all your doubts and fears, you always had a place at the table. It was ready and waiting for you to arrive, to discover it, and to take your seat.