What's Your Medicine?

When my late husband Timmy cooked, it was magic in our kitchen! 

The world might be crumbling outside but somehow Tim’s food had the power to calm almost any storm. 

In his absence we’ve longed for those kinds of meals that stop chaos in its tracks and slow down time for at least the duration of a simple shared meal. 

It’s taken me some time to feel at ease in our kitchen without him. 

I have the essentials at my disposal but have lacked passion, interest, and appetite. 

One of my daughter’s birthday requests was to have a shared meal with extended family, like her dad would have made. 

She didn’t necessarily say the latter part of that…but she didn’t have to either. 

When she asked, I knew what she was longing for. 

Because I’ve been longing for it too. 

Today, in the midst of feeling painfully incapable of fixing the parts of our world that are crumbling, I set out to bake my daughter a cake. 

As I was grating, measuring, pouring, blending, and baking, I had the gift of a glimpse into the magic Timmy created. 

It wasn’t magic at all actually. 

It was love. 

Love for the harvested-with-his-own-hands food before him. 

Love for the rustic Italian recipes and how they came to be. 

Love for those he would be serving on the other side of all that preparation. 

It was also a life-giving meditation in action that replaced a spiritual practice that no longer fed his soul. 

As I grated the lemon peel and took in its incredible citrus scent, I could think of nothing else. 

It wasn’t that the problems beyond, or even inside of, our doors disappeared or that I became less sensitive to them.  

It’s that I found a way to shift my perspective. 

I loved the nature that was disappearing into the California wildfire flames by appreciating the lemon I was grating as if it were one of the last we’d be blessed to eat. 

I loved the people who are swirling in the present chaos of life by doing my part to expand my own inner calm, knowing that I am a part of the whole that connects us all. 

And in doing so, I shed a few tears. 

Tears for Timmy and the magic he made. 

Tears because I understood that his magic making in the kitchen was also his medicine on an ailing planet. 

My medicine is writing. It’s speaking aloud the stuff that moves in my heart to say. It’s being transparent about my exploration around the complicated question of "what exactly does it mean to thrive in a time like now?"

My medicine is also helping people like you find yours. 

We all need medicine in times like now.

And our medicine will be as unique as we are.

There’s no magic prescription that will heal what is ailing us. I believe that we are here, now, to discover it, or create it!  

And when we do, I believe that it will help us thrive and our planet thrive too.