In this new place I was unsure what to do with the offerings. I had brought my little statue of White Tara so I made a small altar on the windowsill of the kitchen but it was not the same. So I made sure I spent time outside; I picked wild flowers for the tables and for the interview room. I made little posies of grasses and forget-me-nots, found dandelion flowers that winked yellowness. I turned to nature to heal my heart; I knew from past experience that it would speak if I was willing to listen, with nurturing sounds of silence, the un-semiotic undertone that connects with our spirit.
The Bala Brook kitchen had power, just like the one at the Maenllwyd. The active practice of cooking comforted me, helped me put self-concern to one side and concentrate on caring for others. There were no interruptions, just me and a line of bowls full of beautiful vegetables, mindfully chopped by the kitchen assistants during the work period. I was already cooking dinner when I realised that I had forgotten to buy tomatoes, so I had to improvise. A sweet potato tagine, which normally I cook with fresh tomatoes, instead featured copious amounts of a Turkish sweet red pepper paste, good ras-el-hanout spice mix, and fresh rose petals that I had picked in the afternoon and dried on the colander above the Aga. For the adventurous I put little bowls of harissa on the table with tiny teaspoons. Adding extra heat is always optional. It all worked out. It always does.
Sweet potato tagine
Serves 4
For the honeyed sweet potato:
500 g sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into slices 2.5 cm thick
50 g unsalted butter
4 tbsp honey
½ tsp salt
For the sauce:
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 tsp coriander seeds, whole
1 tbsp tomato puree
400 g Italian chopped tinned tomatoes
100 g baby spinach leaves
Coriander leaves to garnish
Salt and black pepper
If, after slicing, you are not going to cook the potatoes straight away, place them in a bowl and cover them with water with a drop of lemon juice to ensure they do not discolour.
Pre-heat the oven to 220°C. Put the sweet potatoes in a roasting tin with the butter, honey and salt and place in the oven. Turn them over halfway through the cooking (after about 10 minutes) to colour evenly. Take care not to overcook: they should still hold their shape and have bite.
While the sweet potatoes are cooking, prepare the sauce. Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan and add the onion and coriander seeds. Fry until the onions are golden brown. Add the tomato puree, cook for a minute, still stirring, and then add the tomatoes. Continue cooking for about 5 minutes over a medium heat. Taste and season with salt and pepper.
Add the cooked sweet potatoes and all the juices from the pan to the sauce and stir.
Just before serving, stir the spinach into the tomato sauce and cook for another 5 minutes. Taste again and adjust the seasoning.
To serve, arrange the sweet potato slices and sauce and garnish with the coriander leaves.
The following night I made an aubergine dish with a parsley and tahini sauce, olive oil dripping off the serving plates: rich Moorish flavours. I like to alternate the simple with the opulent in the kitchen; in this way, people learn to taste the way other cultures taste, celebrating both abundance and frugality through shared meals. I made rich chocolate brownies with sea salt and rose petals; the petals sank into the batter as the brownies cooked, transferring their scent into the mixture.
Although I felt satisfied with the dishes I prepared, and with the general flow of the cooking, the deep longing remained. I struggled with low self-confidence and my mind remained agitated, as if on red alert. I had an interview with Jake, the teacher, who tried very hard to help me, to pull me out of this very dark space. I felt isolated and unconnected to the group; the issue of death kept creeping back. I realised that there were parts of my story lying dead inside of me: a love story that was cut dead before its time, which kept coming back to rankle me, uninvited; acts of betrayal by people I loved; aspects of my marriage that were so dormant they felt dead; the lost baby. I realised that I had never properly mourned the loss of that baby, opting instead for an optimistic view: I was blessed with two healthy children and I needed to get on with my life for their sake. What about my sake? Not confronting the death of something creates a morgue in your mind, and I was living with dead things inside my head, dragging me down, engulfing me.
There is a memorial stone by the wall at the side of the brook, with a bench beside it. It stopped raining, so I went to sit on it, taking my notebook and a cup of tea. The memorial bears the name of a young woman, perhaps the house owner’s daughter, who, from the date on the stone, must have died in her late teens. Her memorial sits in a beautiful spot, by a tall oak whose dense branches twist around the trunk, entwined and racing against each other in search of light. I felt the loss of her, my heart felt bruised. It was as if I died a little. Her death, represented by the stone, reminded me of my own losses, my own little deaths, my own woundings. I knew that in order to heal I needed to revisit each wound again, remember what caused it, face it, give it recognition and confront the pain. An unhealed wound becomes gangrenous; it advances and rots whatever it has near. Like a mouldy peach in a fruit bowl: that same contagion of decay.
I was overcome by a sense of shame; I was alive, whilst the girl with her name on the stone was not. I felt hooked on my own melodrama.
The fast-running stream reminded me of loss, of tears I have shed, of home, but it also warned me: stop harking back, let the river run through you, let it wash your sores with its echoing sounds. Your life is now. Regain your foothold, go and serve dinner, take a walk, breathe deeper.
The sun was still out, though low in the sky, and everything glimmered. I set out for a late walk in my new aubergine rubber boots. Summer was buzzing, swallows flitted around my head, fat bumblebees copulated with hollyhocks. I heard dogs barking in the distance. A few black sheep were having their end of day social.
I walked uneasily up a rocky path, which I later discovered was a stream’s course. I felt a strange sense of vulnerability, of the ground slipping underneath me. My rubber boots were pretty useless on this kind of terrain, but at least they were keeping my feet dry. I was sure I was on the wrong path. It all felt ominous. What if I fell and broke my neck? What if I died? More melodrama.
I climbed over the stone wall and walked along the next field until the bracken became too thick. Then I climbed back to the watercourse.
Up the hill, beyond the slippery rocks, I found a baby lamb’s carcass. There was a deep beauty in its decay; the skull, teeth and woolly remnants lay flat on the damp soil. Its black trotters, so young and lustrous, were forever redundant.
The sweet smell of rot was pungently soothing: the earth nurtured by the banquet of the fallen. Maggots thrived and birds had pecked out its eyes, torn its flesh. This was the ancient glut of death out of which life flows again. It is like a dance, a primeval yet sacred dance, which never tires. It is balanced like a circle of beauty.
I stood, witnessing the compelling perfection of death, amongst all the thriving life around it. The carcass touched something deep within me, resonating with my anxiety around death.
You can’t bring something back to life, but you can generate life out death.
But how do I do it? How do I deal with a carcass that inhabits my mind?
Do I leave it to simply take its course, until it disappears? The slow-rotting, pecking, maggot orgy would take decades.
Or do I shake it a bit, mulch it and turn it into a composting ground for something new to grow?
Suddenly the lamb’s corpse exuded a dark splendour. I picked some ferns and flowers and made some posies, leaving them to adorn its shrine. I bowed, and continued walking.
Up on the moor, the sun filtered through the dark clouds, making a field of wild flowers sparkle. The green grass was luminescent. The
wounds had become scars and I felt a sense of revival of my mood and spirit.
I was in the Dartmoor postcard and I was the postcard of Dartmoor at that particular moment. It was awesome and fleeting. I opened the gate into the field of flowers, threw off my wellies and felt the damp ground on the soles of my feet. It was a glorious and joyful moment of total presence.
I realised that all that mattered was now, being open to reality. For an instant, I understood that fundamental truth, with my whole heart. Everything else dropped away and my chest filled up with the glory of simply being alive. I stopped dwelling on death, and breathed just like the flowers around me. A feeling of newness, of beauty soaked me up; I felt like a pagan maiden.
I looked directly at the sun, and for a second, I shone with the dock flowers and buttercups, the red campions and grasses. Together we danced a secret midsummer dance with the wind.
Chapter Seven
La Granja
I grew up in a world of stories. Not only the gory fairy tales that fed my imagination, but the tales of the grown-ups around me, and the fascinating life stories of my family and the people we knew.
As soon as school ended we packed the car and went to spend the summer at my grandparents’ house in La Granja. My dad commuted to work every day. The long three months of summer holidays were all about sunshine, playing, reading, social gatherings and family meals.
We loved to lie on the grassy banks outside the house, stargazing. The clear nights opened above us, a sky so vast it gave us a glimpse into the immensity of life, beyond all we knew and had read and imagined. All around us, as in a dance, the fireflies twinkled with the light of summer, like fairies who stored sunshine.
Hot and dry days made swimming our favourite pastime. We swam in the river and in the remote streams we reached after long riding expeditions. We also swam in friends’ pools and in a small swimming pool in the grounds of the house.
The pool was built away from the house, at the bottom of the hill, away from the elms that encircled the buildings so that the sun could help the water lose its night chill. It had a funny shape and I was responsible for that. They built it when I was three and because at that time I was the only child of the family, they consulted me before digging the hole.
“What shape should it be?”
“I want it in the shape of an egg.”
So, if you walk towards the hill, past the bakery and the chicken run, and keep going to where the pine trees are thriving and getting tall, you will find an odd egg-shaped pool with water as blue as the sky. Now I wish I had asked them to build it in the shape of a big castle or a giant hummingbird or the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
The pool was unfenced, and a long way from the house, so the adults were always worrying about us children swimming there on our own. For this reason they invented the story about the eagle.
The giant eagle lived in the rocks beyond the pool and we never saw her because she was always hunting to feed her greedy young. They told us that the eagle hunted for deer and hares and that if we were by the pool on our own she would not hesitate to turn us into prey. She would spot a stray child, fly low, grab it in her sharp claws and drop it not too far away, on the rocks at the top of the hill, break all its bones and then feed it to her babies. I think they made up the story because they were scared we would drown.
Like Lili’s niece. She drowned when she was two. She used to play with my sister and then one day she tripped in the garden when no-one was watching, fell face first into a shallow bucket and drowned. My sister was too young to understand, but that summer she didn’t want to swim anymore.
We all learned to swim when we were very little. My dad used to throw us into the middle of the pool and smile and shout: “Swim like little fishes!” He used to say that babies are born knowing how to swim. I think that my sister forgot out of shock.
Lili’s niece had two older brothers. I used to play with the three of them, but after her death they didn’t come to their grandma’s house in the summer anymore. Lili’s mother, Doña Maria, had come from Poland as a refugee from the war. She was a prisoner of the Germans and they put her and her family into a train carriage without food and water in the winter on a journey that would take days. She became ill and her tonsils were so inflamed and infected, she could hardly breathe. She told us that some of the German soldiers were compassionate enough to throw snow into the carriages as the people moaned with thirst when the train made its stops. She swallowed a snowball almost whole and with it, her tonsils. The snowball saved her life, otherwise she would probably have died of the infection.
She came to Argentina where she was reunited with her husband. They moved to La Granja, where they raised their two daughters. Many people who lived in the village arrived as refugees from the war; there was even a Bavarian-looking castle, hidden in the forest, built by the village philanthropist.
Doña Maria was an excellent cook. She used to fast during certain days in Lent and throughout the Easter weekend. On her fast days she used to cook, slaughter a pig, make cold meats and sausages, decorate egg shells and make the most delicious biscuits with poppy seeds. I was always happy when I visited her house. She kept animals and had a big kitchen garden. I loved digging potatoes with her; we unearthed our treasure from the mucky ground, removing fat earthworms and placing them back in the soil. She gave us a bucket and we would sit in the garden and scrub the potatoes clean with a brush. They looked like jewels.
My uncle, Jorge, who died suddenly when he was very young, was in love with Lili. He had a picture of her standing on the beach, tucked inside his book of Pablo Neruda’s poetry, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. Jorge had a shark’s skull with all its teeth intact. He would make up stories of wrestling with the shark to protect Lili while they were swimming in the Patagonian Sea. I used to touch the shark’s teeth with the tips of my fingers.
Many Polish people used to visit Lili’s mother, Doña Maria’s, house. Sometimes a strange man would come and stay for the weekend. He would stay in one of the outbuildings. His face fascinated me. His name was Jorge, like my uncle, and he worked as a concierge in the city’s smartest hotel. He never looked happy; I always thought that he had suffered starvation during the war, as we would often see him eating old, dry bread. Lili recently told me that in Poland, before the war, he had belonged to an aristocratic family and was a renowned pianist. When the war broke out he managed to escape to Sweden with his wife and children, then to Switzerland and finally to Córdoba. I remember him making endless cups of tea from the same tea bag and dipping the old bread in it while he soaked up the sun.
On Easter Sunday we would go to Doña Maria’s house for tea. In the dining room, in the centre of the house, she would set a long table, covered with a white linen cloth. On it, amidst small vases of cut flowers, she laid all her best china dishes, carefully filled with the food she had spent weeks preparing. There were ground almond cakes; different-shaped biscuits topped with icing, nutmeg or poppy seeds; smoked Polish sausages; homemade cheese; sweet pastries filled with quince jelly from the orchard and black bread with caraway seeds. She said that she loved to watch us eat all her hard work. She stood and smiled, her eyes watery. She would give us little chocolate eggs before we left, quietly, as if it was a secret. My mum said that she put all that effort into keeping alive the traditions of the family she left behind, so that she might feel a little closer to home.
Chapter Eight
Retreat Four: The Art of Cooking
It was a fine autumn, and I was preparing for the next retreat. Peter, who I had met on previous retreats, had requested to train as a cook, and we had selected a retreat led by John as the best opportunity to do the training. He flew in from Germany and came to stay for a couple of days in York beforehand. He wanted to get a sense of how I prepare. Preparing for retreats is like preparing for an expedition and he wanted all the details. I took him for lunch to my favourite Sardinian restaurant, before embarking on a foodie trail of town, looking for
spices and ingredients in different shops, trying to get a sense of the food that called out to us. We chose Maldon smoked sea salt, pink mustard, and tiny chanterelle mushrooms from the Hairy Fig. We visited my local Indian shop and bought vegetables we had never cooked with before: kohlrabi, karela (bitter gourd), long string beans, mehti, baby aubergines. We filled baskets at Alligator, and bought a candle for the kitchen.
I wanted the ingredients to inspire him, rather than my teaching alone. I showed him the stock take from the previous retreat, and how to make lists based on this. This is important work, as it is better not to leave the house once you are on retreat. If you run out of something, you have to experiment with something else, use your imagination and trust that things will work out in the end. I taught him that all planning needs to take the environment of the retreat into account: who will be coming, and what the weather will be like. People eat less fruit in winter, but more cake. Women eat less cheese but use more toilet paper.
Peter had been a participant on my first retreat as a Tenzo. I remember noticing as his curiosity about cooking in the Maenllwyd intensified, just as the kitchen had intrigued me the first time I went there.
I also remember his kindness. When I first became a cook I thought I should follow as much of the retreat programme as possible, rather than concentrating on cooking wholeheartedly in the rudimentary kitchen. I didn’t get enough rest and ended up developing debilitating migraines due to exhaustion.
It all became too much, but I continued cooking. Peter noticed, and volunteered to come and help me, instead of sitting; the teacher told him that his place was on the cushion. I was touched by his eagerness to help me, and for the rest of the retreat I tried to let him have a more hands-on role. I asked him to prepare a salad from scratch rather than drying up the dishes and putting them away.
Tales From a Zen Kitchen Page 6