The Venn Diagram Between Me and God
on making borscht
Hey yall! During last fall I participated in the most beautiful midlife circle facilitated by my midwife. We had an assignment for a final project integrating what we had been feeling through in the circle. I wrote this piece of writing with the intention to read it to our group while they sipped borscht I made. Of course I got sick and couldn’t attend. I’m sharing it here now, with you. Peace be with you in this January, sustained heaven/hell combo that is life on earth.
On Tuesday night I made borscht. It was the first time I had made it this winter and I realized I make it every winter, many times, but I had forgotten that. There’s not a better color, so you can spend this time listening (or not), slash contemplating the color. You could drink your borscht if you like or you can close your eyes and imagine the thing you like as much as I like borscht instead. My goal is that by the end of this essay you remember it’s your spiritual savior too. Actually, it probably won’t also be your spiritual savior—these things rarely translate so easily. I’ll consider it a success if you remember another thing that is your spiritual savior, which you can make in your house on any given day.
I've been working on step three in Codependents Anonymous and I am new to twelve step programs so please don’t take my interpretation of it as representative. One thing I do know about twelve step tiny babies like myself is that they tend to want to tell everyone about the 12 steps. I am not an exception to this rule. Step 3 reads:
We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
Lately I imagine this is about a kind of willingness to free myself from the delusion that I am in control. But it’s not a free fall. It’s about the creatures, entities, deities, magical weather systems that remain out of view - behind my lungs, above my skull, underneath my feet, when my consciousness is deluded that I’m orchestrating things. When I get stuck in only looking in front of me, as if I’m the conductor. First of all, the looking as the habit. Second of all, the looking in front of me only as the habit. So I’m telling you as a way to keep remembering to practice first of all, looking in other directions, and second of all, perceiving using methods other than looking. This feels like a new kind of work for me, even though I've been trying to inhabit permission to be unmediated spiritual since I was 10. No one has ever really explicitly asked me to define god until these zoom rooms, or if they did I wasn’t quite listening, and now—how sacred the little squares of people in homes, cars, at their work desks, their generosity to appear there with me, from wherever they are, to listen and share where and how we find god.
Root vegetables, the knife my sister brought me from Japan, the hard wood floors of my kitchen, this skeletal structure. Borscht is very old, wikipedia tells me, which verifies my feeling about it. How it stains my hands to cut the beets. How it stains my shit, and when I see that, I remember what I ate, that a cycle is taking place in my body, that I am being held by laws, the loving, real kind, a structure, god in the form of Saturn, a cousin of Earth maybe, who can be oppressive or grounding. Usually both. Incarnation is a series of koans, appearing to increase in complexity as I go.
The thing is, when I consider my blood ancestors, I just read: fear. A rabbit in a field. Like everyone has been basically frozen for centuries. That's not the only truth, but it's a big one. My dad stopped speaking to me almost two years ago. When I was a child he appeared brave for a while, and now I can't tell if he was or it just looked that way. Or if youth just looks like bravery. Now he's burrowed in a condo in Denver with his fear and his wife's fear, waiting to die. That sounds dramatic because it is, he is, it's a dramatic fucking situation, but there's no sound at all. Just a blank. Not even a grey "delivered" under the last iphone message I sent him. My older kid is growing out of the jacket my dad sent him, the last remaining object which marks his presence in our lives, soon we will pass it on and my kids will forget him completely. During the holidays I often think, well at least we don't have to coordinate with another person, that much simpler. I'm sure there's a lot of feeling in there somewhere about it, but for now I can't find it. Maybe that's why I often feel I am forgetting something important, something I misplaced.
When I read myself within my ancestry line, I still read fear, more now than when I was 20. Sometimes it appears I used to be braver too. But earlier it felt like there was a way to clearly demonstrate my bravery to myself, now it feels there’s a web that exists in too many dimensions to count and any movement on any line of it is brave in one way and cowardly in another.
Maybe one of the reasons it feels so good for me to make borscht is the attempt to control is right-sized. It’s an act that signals I’m stewarding life, not futilely trying to pin it down. It’s mine to manage the chopping of the vegetables, the lighting of the stove, the stirring of the soup, the washing of the dishes. It’s mine to feed myself and those willing to let me feed them. It’s mine to move my body in the motions I’ve learned to sustain life. I think there’s more that’s mine to do, but making borscht feels squarely on my side of the venn diagram between me and god.
Here’s a part of the essay where I need to summarize in an unsatisfactory way for time, and for things I don’t yet know how to write about but you all are very intuitive and hopefully can fill in my blanks with your own associative autobiographical leaps.
Various experiences involving desire and its lack of reciprocity, and maybe just my general vibes, have made it difficult and at times impossible to trust what I want. I have become a mother to two creatures of this particular lifetime; I keep saying and feeling we incarnated at the same time even though I lived 38 years before they came.
Re desire and its lack of reciprocity - for example I planned to have two home births and instead I had two c-sections in the same hospital. The typical response to this is to be very sad and count the ways I did not act correctly to get what I wanted, in that false american meritocracy equation of desire + effort = satisfaction. I did the typical response to this for a long time and then my second child came and I did not get “what I wanted.” Now I think “what I wanted” is a gesture to shift things around, but it’s moving in darkness no matter what, and what I get instead is better. But not because it’s more pleasant or fun. The problem is I’m trying to write about one thing as a stand-in for a lifetime of things, and mostly you can scratch all that and understand a significant uncomfortable thing in my life is not knowing how to trust what I want. I feel perpetual seasickness at the circular nature of time.
Another way I could describe it is: I'm often not hungry. I'm often grossed out by food but I barely acknowledge this because I go through my days preparing food for other people and eating because it's time to eat, without being incarnated with what I want at all. In fact it took me doing this assignment to discover that I'm often not hungry.
Borscht is a thing a lot of people don't like, everyone (besides me) in my household included. It's so humble. Chopping leeks. Parsley as the greens, not a garnish. At this point I generally avoid talking about broth because the trad wife association annoys me but I need you to know I'm not sure there are chickens on the planet who have a better life than these we are drinking now. They were daily kissed by Eddy, 6, and Milo, 2. I have stood in a raging storm in the chickens’ shit while they putz around in their coop, so cared for they get to be confident. (Side note: I would like you to feel so cared for you get to be confident too.) Lemon squeezes, these tiny suns in winter. Creme fraiche. Rye toasts. Hard boiled eggs. I'm not sure my lineage is from Eastern Europe but I'm definitely from humans who boiled vegetables and drank them and when I do the same my body remembers and there is way less to figure out.
When I start eating Borscht I can't eat it slowly, I must slurp it messily, getting fuschia drips on my new cream sweatshirt every time. Making and eating it is my new middle-aged version of peace. I thought for ages, before this middle age, that peace was the absence of wanting, and maybe it was, in those other ages. Right now its presence—wanting something very explicitly, clearly—is the shining bell of my own life sounding in my ears.