I stay home. A lot. I don’t wear a mask outside in the fresh air and stay at least six feet away from people. When I go into any building, I wear a mask and keep my distance. When I visit a business with unmasked employees and customers, I stop going — as much as I believe in supporting local businesses.
Some friends and readers may judge me as too careful. Others may judge me as careless, taking chances that could spread a deadly virus to their families.
This last year, I’ve struggled with feeling judged and I’ve struggled with trying not to judge others over flashpoints and controversies like masks.
The judgment and divisiveness have been just as exhausting as the hundreds of decisions about how to manage the risk of contracting or spreading COVID-19. This is such a painful, divisive time in our American family.
This combination of confusing public health messaging, misinformation and the need to do unnatural things like not hugging or seeing people we love for a long time provided us with more ammunition than ever this past year to judge each other’s behavior — as if we needed that!
“My definition of judgment for this book is pretty straightforward: Separation from love. The moment we see ourselves as separate from anyone else, we detour into a false belief system that is out of alignment with our true nature, which is love.”
Soon, I spotted judgment everywhere. (Remember, this was before the pandemic!) I heard and recognized judgment from my own mind, my voice and the judgment from others.
This, according to Bernstein, is an initial, baby step toward scrubbing my thoughts and words free of judgment, and kicking the judgment habit. I have a lot of work to do on this, a long way to go.
This past year has been especially challenging.
Imagine if We Quit Judging Each Other (even just a little)
I think a lot about where we go from here, and how we mend ourselves and our society. How do we work our way toward peace as individual people? as families? as communities? Perhaps letting go or healing our judgments of each other is a big part of that.
We judge each other constantly in so many ways — how we look, what we wear, what we drive. We judge by skin color, and by anything that’s different than us or what we believe.
It feels so awful to be judged, right?
And we all do it. Constantly.
It’s so easy to judge someone for being different. We react out of anger, fatigue or defensiveness. We react out of our own pain.
And, how about judging ourselves? The chattering in our minds.
Been there. Done all of that — even some days before a first cup of coffee.
Breaking an Awful Cycle
Bernstein writes about what she calls “The Judgment Cycle.”
Here’s how it works:
Some external event in our lives causes us to separate from our true nature, which is love. That separation leads to inadequacy, loneliness and ultimately fear.
“We want to protect ourselves from that fear, so we project it outward in the form of judgment,” Bernstein writes.
Which leads to more separation.
She outlines six “judgment detox” steps, drawing on meditation, prayer and other spiritual practices, and writes about her daily practice of them.
“The Judgment Detox dissolves all boundaries with love. It brings us back to this truth: We’re all connected one way or another. We all suffer. We all feel unworthy and abandoned at times. But identifying sameness in one another allows us to shift our focus from separation back to love,” writes Bernstein.
Love is the antidote.
(How about that? It all comes back to love.)
Work in Progress
But wow — in our real, gritty daily lives, it’s hard to actually pause to identify that sameness and find the love, right?
Tough stuff. This takes time. Thus, the exercises. The practice. Work in progress.
So when I notice judgment, I practice shifting my attention and energy to love. I look for what we have in common. We are all affected by this pandemic and struggling to muddle through it. We all love our children — sometimes imperfectly from broken, wounded hearts. We’re all doing the best we can.
There is no “them” — just us. We’re all children of God.
This judgment detox is a work-in-progress. But I’ll tell you, I’ve found Bernstein’s tips useful in bringing me some peace. We all have people in our lives we still have to deal with, even though we’d rather not.
The last time I saw one of those people was a long time ago. (I don’t get out much!) I noticed myself get annoyed and twisty, said a little prayer to hold the person “in the light” and quietly extracted myself. It felt much better. Give it a shot. See what happens. Maybe it can help us mend.
Living Through a Pandemic
Back to all those decisions we face about how to live through this thing. Masks are unpleasant. The first few times I wore a mask last spring felt odd and surreal.
We’ve never had to wear them before! My background as a science writer and daughter of a scientist-mom helped me accept and adopt masks.
Other people come from different backgrounds and look at this through different lenses.
Scientific research continues to mount that masks are effective in reducing our risk of virus transmission. To see a picture of baseball players wearing masks during the 1918 pandemic, visit this October 6, 2020 article in the journal “nature” and scroll down. This article is a great, detailed summary of the state of the science from last fall — and it illustrates my point that emerging science doesn’t lend itself to tidy, absolute or clear messages.
Centers for Disease Control lab experiments found snug surgical masks and two-layer combo of cloth and surgical mask reduce viral transmission by 96.5 percent, according to a Feb. 21, 2021 report in the New York Times.
The numbers vary by model, but the research is telling us: Masks save lives. Why wouldn’t we do that?
Staying home is easy for me. I’ve worked from home for a long time. My husband is a school administrator who goes to school every day, so my strategy is to keep my risk as low as possible to help balance his. We’ll see. We’re not free and clear yet.
Infectious disease experts and public health officials are concerned about the new virus variants.
So I’ll keep wearing my mask, staying home and shopping at places where people wear masks and I feel safe. This is how I’m living through this thing and doing my best to protect and keep our family healthy.
For the people who don’t agree? Well, I hope we can try harder to understand each other, and hold each other in the light.
As I mixed ingredients for meatloaf, then mashed the potatoes last Sunday afternoon, I listened to a poet explain over the kitchen speaker how we are all stitched together as one in Indra’s Net — a spiritual concept I find comforting.
For a long time, I’ve thought we are all connected as threads in a giant, gorgeous quilt. This image of a jeweled net, with each of us on a knot or node, anchored by a jewel reflecting all the other jewels in the net also resonates with me.
So it was a hallelujah moment, right there in the kitchen, during the cooking. I may have gasped, confusing my husband who wandered in to check on me, and dinner.
Let me back up a bit.
Soulful Sundays
Sundays can be tricky. There is all this stuff I want to get done to be ready for Monday, on a day for rest and spiritual reflection.
We often attend the church service next door, take a long walk in the woods — or sometimes both. (I write about my faith with no intention to judge or pressure anyone. Read some thoughts on faith.)
Often, on Sunday afternoons, I soulfully multi-task by cooking something big that gives us leftovers, and listening to music or podcasts so my mind can reflect and my spirit can recharge while my hands are busy chopping.
Last Sunday, I mixed and shaped four pounds of ground venison into meatloaves and a batch of meatballs, then boiled and mashed potatoes and made a pot of potato-leek soup. We are a hunting family with the good fortune to have plenty of venison in the freezer. I like to share it.
I cooked and listened to an unedited interview with Anita Barrows, a poet, psychologist and translator, about “The Soul in Depression,” an episode of a podcast I love. It was so full of rich insight about depression.
Krista Tippett interviewed Barrows for the “On Being” podcast.
About “On Being”
This winter, I re-discovered the work of Krista Tippett, a writer and host of On Being which examines the “animating questions at the center of human life: What does it mean to be human, and how do we want to live?
Tippett’s work won me over long ago. The website describes On Being’s approach as: “Opening the moral questions of humanity hospitably to the seeker, the atheist, and the devoutly religious.”
Nearly 20 years ago, I would listen to Tippett’s conversations on a radio show called Speaking of Faith while cooking in my Maine kitchen on Sundays or driving home in the dark from a weekend visit somewhere.
I needed those conversations then — and appreciate them now, to cope and make sense of our times in which multiple crises unfold. I love listening to Tippett explore these questions across disciplines and religious traditions.
I believe God talks to us in many different ways. And I see the sacred and divine in many places, ways and traditions.
Connected through Stitching
Like quilts. God speaks to us in quilts.
My grandmother sewed clothes, and I loved to watch her hands work the cloth through her machine. When she died in 1995, I inherited her sewing machine and supplies, and soon fell in love with quilts and quilt-making. (Read a Calm Center in the Storm.)
Just about every quilt I have seen is so exquisitely beautiful it speaks to my soul. Often, I’m crying as I walk through a display at a community hall, school gymnasium or fine arts museum, viewing the incredible, hand-crafted quilts — even though they are all so different from each other.
The singer Sammy Hagar explained his experience of viewing a painting in a museum, that struck him as so beautiful it just reached right into him and touched him. He wove that moment into his lyrics of the Van Halen song “Best of Both Worlds.”
When he described the backstory of those lyrics in an interview, I recognized that breathtaking, awe-inspiring moment of connection.
That’s what I feel like when I see a quilt.
A Stitch — not the Quiltmaker
Quilts and quilting brought me comfort after the September 11 terrorist attacks shook us to the core. That day led to heartbreak upon heartbreak, new wars, a surge of hate crimes against Muslims — and people perceived to be Muslim.
The world felt to me as if it would spin right off its axis.
In my business magazine work, I was already writing about climate change, because my job was to cover trends in global seafood supply and I studied marine science, oceanography and ecology.
I was afraid and overwhelmed, working to understand what was going on, what it meant and my place within it.
I’m not sure how or where this idea came from, but I began to think of life and the universe as a really big quilt. I am not the quiltmaker. I am a stitch. A thread.
On my best days, a colorful patch of fabric, and in my worst times a piece of thread working to stay strong and not unravel.
When I would get overwhelmed with the weight of the world, I thought about that big, glorious quilt of the universe and all the cosmos, all the traditions and discipline and music, art and poetry, all the ancestors and all the mysticism and legends.
When I, as a terribly flawed human being, start worrying or trying to fix all the problems of the world, my most important job is to remember that’s not my job.
My job is to keep my stitch as strong and beautiful as possible, to support the strength of all the stitches around me and ultimately the strength and beauty of whole, glorious multi-colored quilt.
Practicing Connection
In the pandemic, when connection has become especially important, quilts and quilting have again brought me comfort and peace and connection. The bluebirds. Making Pie. Baking Bread. Hugging the trees. Music and song lyrics. Church services and rituals. Nature and gardens. Breath. Water. Stories. These are all my paths and practices of connection. Yours are different and that’s OK — this quilt is huge!
In the interview I listened to last Sunday, Anita Barrows spoke of growing up in a Jewish family with a mother who suffered from depression. She described observing a “permeable darkness” and how she could feel a change in the atmosphere as a child when she stepped into her mother’s bedroom, where she was often sleeping or crying.
Barrows talked about suffering her own depression after the birth of her eldest daughter. It’s impossible to make sense of those awful days as they are happening, she said. Looking back, Barrows said what has worked for her more than anything is the experience of being interconnected and held by the web of life.
She quoted her friend and colleague Joanna Macy, speaking about the net of Indra, a goddess.
“Indra’s net spans the entire universe and it holds each sentient being, and every one of us is on a node in that net. You know how if you move one node or knot in a net the whole rest of it is affected,” said Barrows.
– unedited interview with Anita Barrows by krista tippetts, 2002, audio published feb. 4, 2021, on being podcast, apple
The net is our true home and out of it we cannot fall, continued Barrows. It represents our oneness — the ways in which we are all part of God.
“Every tradition that I have worked my way into has really spoken to me of that,” she said, “that sense in which all things are one, all things are held, all things are the same, and therefore that horrible experience of exile which I think is the essence of depression, exile and that dreadful self-consciousness and self-enclosure has been solaced by that practice of oneness, that practice of really trying to know the oneness.”
Whether a jeweled net or a stitched quilt, this idea brings me tremendous comfort and makes so much sense to me.
This reminds me of the advice of a spiritual teacher in those post-Sept 11 years: “What are you afraid of? You are a child of God and you can’t fall off the earth.”
It’s empowering to me, too. Because if we can lean into that strength, can’t we also work to mend the places where the quilt is torn? We are not the quilt- net-makers, but we can hopefully be menders and helpers in our own ways.
No single one of us can fix the pandemic or the injustices of racism or climate change. But we can each be strong, and loving and giving and hold together our piece of the quilt, as we celebrate how beautifully woven we are with each other — and all of nature.
Sunday has come around again, and I’m off to cook — and tune into the sacred and divine all around us.
I’ll talk and write about my faith — but never intend to pressure anyone.
I believe in LOVE above all else, and that means respecting your right to believe whatever you believe.
I believe in God as an infinite source of love — and at different times of my life have used the name Spirit or the Universe. I’ve practiced and explored different religious traditions, but throughout my life have always believed in that infinite source of love many people call God.
I believe in finding common ground among various faith practices, and that love is a really big tent. Be loving. Be kind to others. Take care of people. Take care of animals, plants and nature. Seek peace.
For many years, walking in the woods, or sitting on a rock by the sea or on top of a mountain made me feel closest to God.
Lots of really good people have really good reasons to avoid church or organized religion. I know plenty. I used to be one. Then I moved next door to a church, because I fell in love with a man whose family has been part of this church for many years.
After awhile, one summer Sunday morning, during my coffee time outside in my favorite chair, I decided I’d go next door to the church service at 11. It seemed like time. You could say the Spirit moved me.
My husband never pressured me. A neighbor invited me, and said she thought I’d appreciate the wonderful community. She was right.
I’ve only heard love, acceptance, kindness and wisdom from our pulpit — and so I keep going.
The next summer, the pastor married us in front of an old stone house at the state park five minutes away — a place where we have walked so many miles and held so many family picnics that it feels like an extension of our home.
In the last several years, I’ve cherished my church community and the ritual of church services. Yet, to me, living that faith means honoring each person’s spiritual journey.
My wish: That we all feel infinite, divine, unconditional, healing LOVE. From that, all is possible.
The stories here on ThanksgivinginFebruary.com explore making peace with ourselves, our families, each other and our world. I believe we make our own peace, with love, and from scratch. Similar to how we make great apple pies, our homes, big family dinners and quilts.
It’s hard work, over time. The same way I craft stories and am building out this website: By hand, from scratch and with love.
All by myself and simply following a recipe? Not at all! Only with help from the divine source of all love and all peace, God. (I’ll talk and write about my faith, but never intend to pressure anyone. Read Some Thoughts on Faith.)
My point is that we all have a lot of work to do to make peace happen. Just look around.
How? My stories explore these questions and are intended to be inspiration for your journey.
I’m a seeker. A wanderer and a writer. One who questions. I offer my stories, life experience, ideas and ability to find information and experts.
The Gifts of Solitude & Wild Peace
In my 20s, I spent much of my leisure time alone in beautiful places on the Maine coast. Walking along beach roads and sand dunes. Sitting beside the sea or a lake, writing and reading. Hiking through forests, climbing mountains in western Maine, and planting gardens. My beautiful and soul-satisfying love affair with the natural world.
Making peace with everyone in my life and all around me struck me as an important life goal. This insight was a gift. If not for all that quiet time, I may have missed it. Though at the time, I wondered why I was alone so much.
More than two decades later, I’ve landed in a sweet spot in my life, when I feel a deep peace and contentment — even though there is still so much hard work to be done in this world.
And I know how fragile peace is. Life can change in an instant. Peace is not just found in the quiet stillness of wild places and the pews of sacred sanctuaries, but is itself elusive and wild.
When we make peace with ourselves, with our families and with the natural world and world around us, I believe everything is better.
We talk about wanting peace — but are enough of us prepared to do our own work to make it?
And what do you do if someone is not interested in making peace with you? And does making peace mean you are silent about what’s bugging you? Maybe sometimes. But not always. Making peace may start with saying your peace.
Finding Gratitude in the Darkest Times
If you’ve been on this journey with me the last few years, first: Thank you. You know gratitude has been the focus of my stories. Gratitude was a central part of the true family story at the heart of Thanksgiving in February.
Finding gratitude in the darkest times and in the dead of winter is a symbolic, lasting lesson of Thanksgiving in February. So was pie, and turkey and stuffing. And connection.
Here we are in February 2021, the darkest winter in my lifetime.
Gratitude remains an essential practice.
What I’m working to create here is a place for stories about making peace. Those are the stories I feel called to write.
I sincerely hope you enjoy them, feel a lift or inspiration.
These stories need a home. One built by hand, from scratch and with love.
Welcome. Thank you for reading and being here. My peace I give unto you.
If you like to cook, you probably have some favorite tools, pots, pans or electric gizmos. I’d love to hear about your favorites.
Don’t like to cook?! The right tools might turn a frustrating task into a more satisfying, relaxing — even peaceful — experience.
Try cutting a loaf of crusty bread with a butter knife instead of a sharp, serrated bread knife.The bread gets all shmooshed and torn, and it’s frustrating. Or using a spatula without a tapered edge to scrape brownie batter out of a mixing bowl. Lots of chocolate goodness left behind. Who wants that?
Kitchen tools for me were quirky, fun gadgets, until I worked a few years writing about “kitchenware” for a magazine for owners of independent cookware shops. Kitchenware is everything from pots and pans to blenders and coffee makers, and salad spinners. Tea kettles. Coffee grinders. Coffee makers. Vegetable peelers. Cutlery. Cutting boards.
It was a fun job.
I learned that having the right tool for the job made cooking a much more pleasant experience. And I learned about the best of the best — and what made it high-quality.
But I don’t need one of everything. Just some key essentials for what I like to cook.
My stash of wooden spoons, sharp knives, spatulas and cast iron pans are among my essentials. My favorite, well-designed kitchen tools function beautifully and are too pretty to keep in a drawer.
And I have some new ones!
My essentials, kept on the counter and handy
• Sharp knives. An eight-inch Zwilling J.A. Henckels chef’s knife (great for all chopping); Wusthof long, serrated bread knife (great for slicing bread and tomatoes) and paring knife (apples, potatoes) plus two sharp, medium filet knives (everything else).
• Measuring spoons. Fishing around in a drawer for these is maddening! Mine stay within quick reach and visible in a Mason jar.
• Wooden spoons, rubber spatulas (flame-proof with a tapered edge), soup ladles, metal slotted spoon, and two whisks in the big green tool pitcher.
• Garlic rock and storage crock. The rock effectively smashes a single clove or head of garlic without using a knife and risking a cut. I learned this tip from Lynne Rossetto Kasper and Sally Swift‘s book “The Splendid Table’s How to Eat Supper” cookbook. The small crock rounds up loose cloves (and it’s pretty.)
New additions
• Spurtles!
If you geek out on kitchen tools like I do, you’ve probably already heard of these. The idea is that one tool can stir, smash, fold, and scrape.
And – if you’re ever in a bad mood, just say the word spurtle over and over again for awhile. How can you stay grumpy saying that word?
• A Danish dough whisk, a Christmas gift from my mom, who says it does an exceptional job of stirring the bread dough of the Czech “pascha” bread she makes at Easter and Christmas from my grandmother’s recipe. Seeking connection, I made that bread for Easter 2020 — so I’ll be making it again soon and will try my new whisk!
A few essentials, not pictured
• Cast iron skillets. Nothing beats cast iron. My go-to for just about everything. Natural non-stick and it goes right in the oven. Virtually indestructible.
• Pyrex measuring cups. Clear, easy to see and they can pop into the microwave or freezer.
• KitchenAid stand mixer. Exceptionally durable and well-designed.
• A red, Le Creuset enameled cast iron Dutch oven. Beautiful. Durable.
• A Sitram, stainless steel soup pot with an insulated core bottom. This pot had a close call a couple of weeks ago when I left it cooking a pot of ham and bean soup on a bad burner that overheated as I attended a Zoom meeting away from the kitchen. Big mistake. But after soaking in automatic dishwasher pods and scrubbing, looks like it will be OK.
So — plug in a favorite podcast, or some great music. Pour a refreshing beverage and settle in for some home cooking.
Take great care of you and each other by making cooking fun (& peaceful) whenever you can. The right gear helps!
~~~
How about you? What is your favorite, can’t-function-in-your-kitchen-without-it kitchen gear?
