Cooking For Joy
Chopping Brings Me Solace
I’ll figure out how to use all the bits and pieces later
Editor’s Note: Heated has asked contributors to write about a dish they’re cooking that cuts through bleak headlines, forced isolation, and limited ingredients to bring them joy; we’ll be running at least one contribution a day through this social-distancing stretch.
I wish I could say that I’m using this time at home as an opportunity to make kimchi or learn how to make bread, but the truth is that I’m chopping.
Chopping celery, carrots, and onions. Dicing hard-boiled eggs. Breaking a head of broccoli into florets. De-ribbing kale and slicing the leaves. It’s this meditative kind of prep work that’s bringing me solace right now. Solace, which, as my favorite philosopher David Whyte puts it, “is what we must look for when the mind cannot bear the pain, the loss or the suffering that eventually touches every life and every endeavor; when longing does not come to fruition in a form we can recognize, when people we know and love disappear, when hope must take a different form than the one we have shaped for it. Solace is the beautiful, imaginative home we make where disappointment can go to be rehabilitated.”
I’ll figure out how to use all the bits and pieces later.
