I Love Your Cooking

by Pamelagrace Beatty

I Love Your Cooking

There is a story or poem, by a Persian Poet named Rumi where he talks about an unhappy pea that refuses to stay in the stew pot.  The pea keeps leaping up trying to escape and roll away.  Cook keeps smacking the pea back down into the stew. The pea asks Cook, “Why won’t you let me out? I hate this. I want to be free to be me and me alone.”  Cook tells the pea it is an important ingredient in the stew. It was kissed by the sun, cooled by the wind, nurtured by the bosom of the earth just so it would be tender and perfect for the Loved One to eat in a stew.  The pea said, “Boil me some more Cook, I love your cooking.”

Summer, 2020, there I was, sitting outside on the hottest day of the year (93 degrees so far) in Seattle simmering in this Universal Time Out.  Like the pea I was struggling with staying at home.  Sheltering-in-place is a lovely euphemism for “Oh my heavens, what are we going to do now?” There have definitely been times when, like the pea, I have desperately wanted to pop out of the pot!  The first two or three months of sheltering in place, that was an everyday struggle.  I had no idea how busy I stayed before the shut in.  Now there I was stewing in this pot of limited activity and connection.  Although, in the past, I enjoyed my alone time and required a lot of it, still I liked going places and being with people.  It is still when going out, to see so many masked up.  It is good that more folks are wearing masks, but it adds to the feeling of total isolation. All you can see is their eyes.  And people tend not to make eye contact.  I missed being with people far more than I ever thought I would. I missed having coffee or dinner with my friends, going out with my guy, going to hear friends play music, playing music with my bandmates, and more.  I saw now that people meant more to me than I realized.

One day during that summer, I saw a whole bunch of peas out of the pot.  I drove by Lake Washington and there were people all over the beach playing volleyball, having picnics, cooking barbecue, lying on blankets listening to music and totally ignoring the six feet apart rule.  It looked like a scene from a pre-Covid-19 summer day.  No one was wearing a mask when we all were supposed to be wearing them at that time.  “Uh oh” I thought.  “These kind of breakouts are what is increasing the numbers of Covid-19 cases.”  The last time I looked the number of new cases was three times higher than a month ago. Wild little peas no longer able to stay in the pot. I understand.

How has it been for you?  How are you coping with this enforced isolation? I don’t know which is worse, living alone and just having myself to contend with (which is actually not that bad) or living with a bunch of others (which can be pretty bad depending on how they adjust to each other).  On the last Zoom call from work before the organization shut down due to the pandemic, we were asked how we were doing. One of the women on the call said, “It’s just me and my husband and to my surprise, we are getting to know each other better.  We have more time with each other than ever before.  We are taking turns cooking which has been fun because I usually did all of the cooking.  Yesterday we had a very romantic dinner.  He cooked a delightful new dish we’ve never eaten, and he cut flowers from the garden and put them on the table.  It was a different experience of him.  I am loving this.”  Another married woman in her thirties, one who was always positive and energetic and full of ideas at work said, “I may kill him…my husband.  I don’t know how much longer we can take just being the two of us. We can’t agree on anything, what movie to watch, what to eat for dinner, nothing!  I hate this!!”  Two totally different takes.  I imagine things have shifted by now because I haven’t read about her in the news.

The one thing I keep learning over and over again as I relax into the stew is… to relax into the stew.  The reason the pea told Cook it loved his cooking was because the pea realized it had an important role to play.  Its flavor, its texture, its freshness are all needed to make the stew good.  That is the same for us.  We each bring our own flavor, texture, and freshness to life.  We each have our own special personal ingredients that make a tasty Grand Stew.  We play off each other, get new ideas from each other, learn from each other.  What this metaphor is saying is that it’s important to remember that as we live our lives, we are influencing the lives of others.  So, it’s good to consider that and be the best example we can be. This shelter-in-place experience has given us the opportunity to rethink our lives and plans. Although we don’t know what the future holds or how long this epidemic will last, we can work at making it a better experience in the stew pot and know that in some way we can and do contribute to the tastiness of it all.