Leaps of Faith

Coming in from my daily walk, I shut the door behind me a little harder than intended. Somewhat frantically I peel off my Hawaiian-print mask and drop it in the bag of contaminated-clothes, destined to be washed in hot soapy water later tonight. I take a deep barrier-free breath. My shoes come off next and then I scrub my hands before touching anything else in the house. Home has always been a refuge to me, but these days it is even more so. The world outside feels surreal. With the beach closed, neighbors walk briskly in the streets and on the sidewalks, taking a wide berth around one another. In a matter of weeks, wearing masks has become the socially acceptable look, communicating respect for the rules and an effort to protect each other from whatever unknown germs we may be carrying. As a result, I surprise myself with sudden flares of anger at those who walk unmasked, and those who cross the invisible barrier to the sand, flaunting restrictions designed to protect the public health.

It is all so unsettling. I make sure to get out in the fresh air for my sanity and health but am always very relieved to get home. Re-entering the comfort of my little house pulls me back from the alarm I feel when I am outside: the alarm triggered by the obvious reminders that a virus has single handedly brought our man-made world to its knees.

We like to believe we have control over our lives, over the future. We like to believe we have tamed nature, but this virus has reminded us all of our vulnerability. The world is humbled by the ferocity of nature’s sheer disregard for humanity, and our plans and visions for the future have been forced to change.

 As we step back to weather this storm, by necessity our focus has shifted to meeting the basic needs of society. Our efforts have turned to making sure our children are fed, our neighbors are safe, our work force is paid, our essential workers protected. While children and pets revel in bonus time with their families, no one minimizes what a stay-at-home mom does anymore, teachers are seen for the superheroes they are, and hairdressers are missed with a fierce passion. A light is now shining on the value of so much that had been taken for granted before.

While nature flexes its muscle outside, when I walk through that door I come home to a place where I can focus on what’s important.  I don’t have the energy for those big projects that we all thought we would be tackling when stuck at home. I haven’t written my book or finished my quilt. In the midst of this global pandemic I find that there is little energy for anything that is not critical to our basic needs right now: cooking, communication, caring, community. These were always my strengths while bringing up my family, but I tried to fit them in around doing something “more important.” Now they take a central role. I am in almost constant communication with those I love, near and far, as we support each other. I make masks for friends and family so they can get out safely. I have learned an astonishing amount of technology to be able to do tai chi and play mah jong online with my 93 year-old mom, confined to her room, and to provide essentials and kindle books to my equally sequestered mother-in-law. I care for myself and the world through meditation and laughter and those daily walks.

But mainly, I cook.

Creating comfort in the kitchen is not new to me: having grown up with a mom who taught me well I went on to hone my skills at a French cooking school in my 20’s. Offering fresh baked goods and a warm meal is how I express myself, and how I process life. It makes me happy that with so many of us confined to our homes the kitchen is having a Moment. Kitchens are a lovely source of nurturing and sustenance.

The kitchen is also my favorite place to harness the beauty and wonder of nature. This has taken on new importance in the face of nature’s more recent fearful manifestations. Cooking is my answer to the dark side of what we cannot control; it is a cooperative venture with the natural world. My kitchen has always been a meeting place of science and love: nutrients provided by farm grown vegetables, the chemistry as heat transforms batters into cakes and raw meats into tender stews, and the remarkable magic of fermentation when good bacteria create gifts for the body. On any given day in my kitchen – not just now, but always – there is a linen covered bowl of sourdough bread rising in a warm corner, or milk culturing in my yogurt maker. There are jars of amethyst sauerkraut fermenting, made from red cabbage and radishes and garlic and salt, and a tray of seeds sprouting into bundles of goodness to supplement our diets.

These ultimately delicious nature-harnessing projects require more than just counter space: they call for patience and a leap of faith. Patience, because time is the most essential ingredient. Time is critical, allowing the raw materials to transform into something entirely new, with nutrients, flavors and textures that feed our bodies and spirits.

The need for a leap of faith is perhaps a bit more complex. It is not obvious that the smelly sticky mixture of flour, water and wild yeast I feed every day will eventually become a crusty fragrant loaf of bread. It requires a leap of faith. Faith too is required to trust that the milk in the yogurt-maker won’t spoil but will instead become tangy and delicious. We need faith to believe that the vegetables and salt I packed into jars will transform over 3 weeks into pickled goodness, a version of which virtually every culture in the world claims as a sustaining part of their diet. And faith to believe the tray of tiny seeds will sprout and reach up to the light, bursting with vitamins. In each case, it feels like a little miracle that time and nature create something that is more delicious, more nutrient packed and more digestible than the original ingredients.

The true leap of faith though, during this time of fear and uncertainty, is the faith required to believe that we will be here tomorrow to enjoy the fruits of today’s labor. The truth is that we never really know, and the daily headlines make that clearer still.  I remind myself daily to live in the present so as not to waste the beauty or pain of any given moment. Yet there is a kind of magic in the glorious blind leap of faith we take when we plant seeds today that will flourish sometime in the future. There is a life affirming imperative that drives us to invest energy in a goodness yet to come. 

Today I think about how humanity is stepping back to allow a powerful force of nature have its way. This latest reminder of nature’s dominance over our own imagined sense of control leaves us in no doubt as to the limitations of our role in the natural world. When the virus moves on, spent, leaving us to pick up the pieces, we don’t know what the aftermath will be. As we grieve our tremendous losses we will face challenges in industry, social structures and how we organize our lives.

In the midst of these unknowns, I come back to the little beacons of hope on my kitchen counter, reminders of the ways we quietly put our energies toward future good. I marvel at nature’s continued gifts: the inevitability of spring, the birdsong outside my window and limes ripening on my tree, the sandpipers and seagulls that gather at the beach whether we are there to watch or not. I remember how in the face of hardship we have tended to one another, we have turned towards each other. I think of how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly in the hidden confines of his cocoon, and I wonder what changes our humbled humanity is undergoing within our own. I allow myself a leap of faith that after this time we will emerge transformed, somehow enriched; that we will have evolved throughout this experience of nature in her most terrifying and most beautiful forms.