Open and shut
Contracting, reacting and making...muffins
When in doubt, I default to making — art, a song, some project — but when I’m really feeling stymied, I start cooking. Food, generally, has to be made. Often, I thoroughly enjoy preparing meals, but I recognize a certain cooking state in myself that’s more connected to survival than nourishment or creativity. Today’s trigger was our car getting broken into.
Car break-ins are kind of par for the Bay Area course, but it hasn’t happened to me in quite a while, not since I lived in the city (after three break-ins in SF, I finally sold my car!). Given that our car was parked just outside our house last night, and coming so closely on the heels of our front window being broken, this latest upset (again relatively minor in the scheme of things), really got under my skin.
As soon as Kwame came in to report what happened, I felt myself contracting. An expense, an inconvenience, a violation. Fortunately, nothing was stolen. But add broken glass to the raft of hard news: friends struggling with illnesses and cancelled leases or passing away altogether, and the background roar of encroaching authoritarianism, Epstein file-related fallout, deadly avalanches, and cold and stormy weather, it’s felt easier than ever to shut down.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot this year. Fear shows up in sneaky ways even when I think I’m coping just find, my mind chewing on the unknown, filling in the not knowing of who and why and when with all kinds of what-ifs and projections. A diffuse fear has been infiltrating my literal dreams and making me want to stay home. Fortunately, I have some basic physical movement built into most of my days…today that meant taking the bus downtown to a Pilates class. After, I walked home amid sporadic rain showers, noticing my fretful brain had finally started to quiet, replaced by the urge to cook.
Fortunately, too, the Winter Olympics are in progress. This afternoon, while some home security cameras were (a little belatedly!) on order, I caught clips of ice princesses spinning gold and set to cooking, chopping and roasting butternut squash for soup. As I sauted onions and stirred blueberries into muffin batter, I flashed back on how I’ve defaulted to making food after past upsets, post-earthquakes and 9/11, an instinct I attribute to my grandmother. Nana lived through two World Wars and a depression and managed to raise a family. She understood survival very, very well. There was no rest until a meal was on the table.
“Eat, eat,” she’d say, first thing when you visited, and then send you off with leftovers, cookies, and whatever her garden was yielding at the moment.
If you came over today, I’d be telling you the same thing: “Eat, eat…and check out this skater perform a a triple lutz-triple loop! I don’t think of ice skating or skiing or curling (!) much if at all in my day-to-day life, but wow is it inspiring to see badass masters of sport do their thing (and clap back as needed).
I first heard writer and healer Deena Metzger’s name in the first writing group I ever joined, taught by a writer named Cynthia in Boulder, Colorado, sometime in the 1990s. We’d write to a prompt and then read aloud to the group. It felt radical and liberating, an experience I now see has pivotal and which informs me to this day. Decades later, I took a few workshops with Deena here in the Bay Area and understood why Cynthia talked about her so reverently. Deena’s now on Substack, too, and one of her latest posts felt especially well-timed.
“We need everyone to participate in resisting safely and peaceably in small, interconnected groups, in whatever ways we can, in ecologically bound, mycorrhizal entities, nourishing the human and the more than human as we devise new or restore the old, old ways to live that undermine the criminal mind….” — Deena Metzger