Your passport to love and to freedom!

“And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.” — Kahlil Gibran

While cooking I feel the world’s most beautiful orchestra happens, combining all our senses together. The sense of touch, smell, sound, taste, and sight all get awakened while cooking. The natural forces, fire, air, water, earth, and space conspire together to make cooking a sacred experience. Our senses pave the way to touch our hearts. Cooking is one such meditation to invite life into oneself. It creates a great unison in our being and transport us to a state of being mindless. I say mindless because you get so involved in the act of being, there is absolutely nothing you think of, not about whom the meal is being made, how this is going to turn out, absolutely nothing at all. You don’t think while cooking, you feel it. A cook is never the one who makes a dish, he just lets it happen to bring together the elements of nature and it is those elements that play with each other and the cook just orchestrates it.

“Cooking is meditation. Cooking is a great adventure. Cooking is a love affair.”

I personally feel cooking alone is just an incomplete act, it is in the serving and sharing what we have cooked makes it a whole and a fulfilling experience. You become selfless when you serve and share.

For most of my life, cooking has been either to serve myself (and I delight in that a lot ) or for a maximum of two people, but when I got to experience cooking for a lot of people, the experience of it was totally different. I do not know how many of you have experienced it when you cook for a celebration for many loved ones, never will you actually feel hungry. Your hunger gets satiated when your people gathered for a meal, enjoy your meal, you feel full. It is an inner satisfaction that fills you up completely.You take a bite here and a piece there and get fed a handful, you feel your life is overflowing. An applause is an appreciation for any performance, but in cooking it is those few moments of silence the person being fed goes into, closing his or her eyes, relishing the meal, THAT is the reward. It is at that moment cooking feels complete. It is where all meet and love explodes. There can be nothing more beautiful than this, nothing more fulfilling than this.

They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. Not just man, the way to anyone’s heart and most importantly to your own heart is through our stomach. Cooking and relishing a good meal is my own sweet moment of feeling my heart. It brings a sense of togetherness, it dissolves borders and has the power to make this world one big family.

Woman liberation often advocates woman are not to be confined to the kitchen.I understand what they mean by that and I am for woman’s financial, emotional and social independence but if we look at it from a different perspective, a kitchen is not a confinement, it is liberation. It is a place for expression, adventure, the courage to experiment and to have the great sense of responsibility. A woman has the grace of receptivity to bring life on earth, she has the strength to unite with her love and she has the blessing to nurture and grow any life on earth. I feel woman are bestowed with sensuality and the creativity to bring life to life. Cooking, cleaning, nurturing are all the powers we are given with and no matter, however, our surroundings are, these give us our inner balance and strength. There is immense pleasure in it for oneself. No wonder I see some of the strongest and beautiful woman have always been the knitters, the sewers, the gardeners, the cooks, the DIYers.

We read, write and see so many things to do for a fulfilling life, finding our passion, achieving our goals, being productive etc to live a happy life. I am in a job that I do not quite enjoy and many a time I feel my true calling is in cooking and maybe I should do something about it, but the minute I feel the need to do something about it, it pollutes my love for it. A goal kills it. When you love it, it just happens. Maybe every day, maybe once in a while, maybe once in a lifetime. It is not how often or how much you practice or whatever. But in the flow and it will take you along and one doesn’t have to know where it leads you to. You just go with it.

“But to yell at your creativity, saying, “You must earn money for me!” is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.”― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

So with cooking I just let it be and enjoy it for my own self and for loved ones. Not put the burden of anything, not even for the appreciation that the food is good. Not attaching any utility to it.
So what is my point here? Everyone cook, nope. It is cooking for me and it could be anything for you. Maybe castle building on the sand, making things, playing with fire, cleaning, it could be anything.

I leave you with this…

“You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not. How many activities can you count in your life that you engage in simply because they delight you and grip your soul? Find them out, cultivate them, for they are your passport to freedom and to love.”- Anthony de Mello.