Cooking makes love manifest. We tend a garden, head for the grocery store or the farmers’ market, receive a largesse of food gifts from family, friends, and neighbors. We set to work or perchance to play. Whenever food appears, it is the work of many people and the offering of other forms of life, a gift from Beyond, from sun, earth, sky, and water, from mystery. It is onion knowing how to onion, salmon fully infused with salmoning. It is blood, sweat, and tears; thoughts, emotions, and physical actions made visible, tasteable, edible. What we can put in our mouths, chew, and swallow, digest, absorb, and eliminate has been sorted out from what we can’t. It is offered, served forth. We go on living. Our bodies are nourished, and if we are fortunate, our spirits are lifted. […]
Lifted, light, and buoyant with the sights, smells, and tastes of what is being eaten, the body remembers that it is also spirit. The divide between body and mind is bridged —no, the two are simply no longer recognized or found. They have become indistinguishable from the present, magnificently vibrant and awash with well-being. Whether spoken or not, thank you choruses throughout the room: to Source, to God, to the Divine, to family and friends, to the chefs, the growers, the pickers and shippers, to our ancestors, to the Blessed Ones and to those nor so blessed, to all beings giving their lives. We give thanks. We are grateful. We forget ourselves. We forgive ourselves, and others. We praise.
It’s in the cooking. It’s in the eating, in the air, the ground, the sunlight. You can tune to it. You can bring it forth.
It’s your good heart expressing itself, manifesting wherever you look. Loving what is. And using your body, mind, and heart to bring it to the table, ready to eat.
— edward espe brown, no recipe: cooking as spiritual practice
