Food Memory #11: “Recovery Meal Plan,” Screaming Bodies and Skid Row (1989)

Nervously adjusting produce scales

Making sure

Washing out measuring cups

Leveling teaspoons

The Meal Plan promises

One can get it just right

Nevermind screaming stomachs

Nevermind hundreds of thousands of years

Of this animal body knowing how to survive

Nevermind its consistent, committed, loyal attempts

To remind me over and over

Sticking by me through

Literally

Thick and thin

This perfectly measured meal

Recommended by experts

While filling me up

And meeting macros

Leaves me empty

And craving Her

Wow, what adventures these memories are taking me on. This time, a lot of the adventure was online sleuthing, trying to find clues to what it actually was that I ate during those “recovery meal plan” days. The memory I referenced in my memoir described how I could only really recall feeling “happy” (read Prozac happy) as I sat alone on the high school cement wall, but that I couldn’t remember a damn thing about the meal I was eating that day or on any of the days of me following that first recovery meal plan. I’m not sure if it was a result of the medication, or my body simply being uninterested in another, although more densely caloric, diet. That it simply didn’t want to remember any of those prescribed meals. Memory is such a mysterious thing.

My task this week, as in past weeks, was to re-create the memory…but how does one do such a thing if they can’t even remember the food they ate, just the feeling? I remember feeling like everything was finally fine–my diet was dietician perfect, I had rules and lines to follow, and I had emotionally mature adults supporting me for the first time in my life with my mother’s intensity. Dipping into the eating disorder, causing concern, brought these supports into my life. And while contentious to say, for this illness to interrupt me being in that obliterating prison alone with her, I will always be grateful.

So again I was stumped in how to re-create this memory. Taking Prozac was out lol, but I figured maybe finding some sort of “Recovery Meal Plan” online might help me find a way to re-enact an eating experience like this one. I did all sorts of research–starting out with looking up that first psychiatrist I went to, then the internist, trying to see if there were any kinds of nutritionists attached to their practices. But being as this was over thirty years ago, these people were not online presences to be researched. All the results from typing “recovery meal plans” into Google were also equally unhelpful. And then I remembered I had an old meal plan on my computer from being a staff at a treatment center some years ago. I decided to make one of these meals.

I went to the store and gathered the specific items for the meal–a baked yam with shredded cheese and broccoli with butter–and headed home. I measured the yam, I measured the cheese, I measured the butter–just like I imagined I did so many years ago, remembering the safety and sense of perfection it gave me to know I could measure and follow something that was given to me by an expert that would be nutritious and self-caring…and of course I’m sure there was also the safety of not eating “too much” in there somewhere. This time around, the measuring cups felt restrictive, soulless, sad…and although it may’ve been what I needed at the time way back then, what I now crave is being connected to my BODY telling me what to eat rather than some plan. Good information, although not new.

Back to the meal, I lit a candle and decided I would look up pictures of the high school I remembered and gaze at them while eating. And embarrassingly, to also put on the first Skid Row album, Skid Row (1989). These images and sounds were the background to that time in my life, so I thought maybe it might conjure a more embodied re-enactment.

The yam was pleasantly sweet, the melted cheese delicious and crispy from broiling, and the butter nestled in the broccoli crevices hit my toungue with that savory, oily amazingness that butter is. But as I looked at the images and listened to these sounds, I started to remember that pre-pubescent teenager, alone on those cement walls. I thought of her budding sexuality and how, in a short six months, she would meet her first love, the one that would change the course of her lifetime forever. I thought of the supportive figures that had entered into her life, how Western Medicine was now her source of parenting, how she had no idea what was to come.

And then the song, “I Remember You” rotated onto the playlist…leaving me basically in a puddle of mushy tears and grief. I of course looked up a picture of this man I was soon to meet and let myself sink into the sadness, the sadness that never seems to go away, the sadness I’ve learned to honor for its shape in my life. At the same time, I also imagined sitting with this girl, extending some support for the experience she was about to go through. Just being with her. Gosh I wish I would’ve actually been there with her on that cement wall, preparing her for what was to come.

As for the meal, after I choked down the last bites through the Sebastian Bach induced mourning session, I realized I was still hungry…that I needed more. But I sat with that feeling, honoring the re-enactment, and possibly the hunger I sat with as that girl, hunger that sloshed and swam beneath the thick layer of happy medication and perfect diet I was on. I let myself feel her hunger, as well as the anger of my body that wanted so desperately to reach out to me and tell me what it already knew how to do. I cried, I stomped, I wailed.

My art session afterwards was mainly around this emptiness, around the anger and tears that never got shed while she was numbed and put on a Stepford plan to cure. How she was never taught how to actually trust her body. Two little blue and white pills showed themselves on the page, as well as an image of the measured meal, both with various authority figures pointing to them as if to say “Eat this! Take that!” And then that hungry, angry, sad and disconnected girl beneath it all. That hungry, angry, sad and disconnected precious animal body beneath it all. I let it all sink in, and at some point blew out the candle, ending the experience.

It is my continued goal to work on re-connecting with that wise animal body, learning to re-form deeper trust, letting it guide me. A strange, often challenging thing to do in a world full of Authority and Diet Culture telling us what it thinks we really need to feed our hunger. What if the bodies we live in have the answers, what if we can spelunk through the thick and layered conditioning that tells us otherwise? What if?

For now–I Remember You, instinctual eater, oh wise animal body. I vow to keep trying to re-member you in my life. Perhaps my tears and grief while listening were really for ignoring you. Thank you for sticking through it with me.

*Meal plans and guidance from dieticians/doctors can and often are necessary in extracting oneself from unhelpful eating patterns. My struggle is of course my own and not advice in how to handle a sometimes very serious confusion. While I struggled with this situation, I am also grateful for the help I received in a difficult time. Please get professional help if you need it.

** Join me for next week’s food memory: McDonald’s. Yay?

**If you’d like to learn more about the Food Memories book I am referencing for these posts, you can support a small bookstore by purchasing it here:

https://www.ebookwoman.com/book/9781689839075

or by searching for Food Memories by Reagan Lakins on any major book selling website.

Food Memory #10: Air, Illness and Liquid

I sink into surrender

Only at threat of bursting organs

Do I turn down this slippery slope

Hecate waits for me there

Watching

Fear, panic, anxiety

Roiling, resisting

Reminding of weaknesses

Potholes

Dark streets I’ve walked before

Yet this time

The choice She watched me make

Was the trusting

Trust vs. mistrust

A long-held confusion

With this body of mine

It screaming for my reversal

Pausing

Clearing

To wash over inflamed tissues

With courses of liquid

But for a day

Would I do it

Should I do it

A walk on this thin, crackling tightrope

Trusting

Trusting?

Last week I mentioned how excited I was to be out of diet memories, and onto something more delicious…I believe I mentioned McDonald’s. In the sequence of my memoir, there are actually two memories before this one that I thought weren’t worth delving into so decided I’d skip on by. These memories included one called “Air” where I recount my budding rebellion to follow doctor’s orders to “just eat,” and where I first notice my mother’s concern for my well-being. Something inside of me chose that day to resist against all opinion to go The Opposite Way by fasting.

So of course, as a person in re-membery, I did not want to re-live the fasting memory, the resistance memory, the memory that started this whole thing in the first place. It was not “good” for me to do. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, my body had other plans.

A few days before my McDonald’s delight, I started feeling wonky. Nausea, chills, slight fever. Was it the dreaded Corona? I waited. And as usual, I made myself eat despite what my body seemed to be saying, for fear of triggering myself into another restrictive episode. Forcing forcing forcing food down. Can’t trust, it’s all a trick to woo you.

But a few days later, when the symptoms kept coming, and a new one of pain in my groin appeared, I became scared. I did the stupid thing and googled all the possibilities I could be hosting, one of which might be appendicitis. Knowing I was probably overreacting, but also not wanting to ignore a serious thing, I struggled with the prescription for a presumed inflamed appendix–eating no solid food, as it might cause the organ to rupture.

Now I know I’ve suddenly gone from a possible stomach bug to appendicitis pretty quick here, but a sharp pain or two and a nagging, strange soreness in the area was enough to make me worry in this direction. I thought to myself, what was more risky, forcing food on an already taxed system and causing possible serious harm, or transitioning to all liquids for one day? I decided on the prior and chose to do the latter. Against all professional opinion of my past and training…I chose to fast.

I gathered juices and broths and shakes and headed in. I set to the task of trusting that my body was actually asking me to give it a break AND that I could pull up my big girl pants after one day and go back onto my regular meal plan. I decided to choose from a place of having faith in myself, and in my body, not from a place of feeling dirty or bad or horrible about myself but from a place of trusting myself and this amazing body I am in.

The choice, the action felt familiar but rebellious, like so many years ago, and it was then I realized that something in me might be constellating a situation to have to relive the Air (and liquid) memory. Pretty trippy, even if it is just a fantasy, to think that my body/soul could do something like that? I decided that this was my chance to re-write that script I entered into so many years ago that said, “I will control my body, I will not trust it.” I decided to use this opportunity to instead choose to tell myself that my body knows what it is doing, and that I can trust it, and that if it seems I am heading in an unhealthy direction as a result of shifting my diet, I can turn that around with my tools. That I am strong enough to know the difference, that I have learned to discern enough to not be living perpetually in fear of going off my meal plan for one day.

The smoothies and juices, the slippery elm tea and bone broths soothed something inside of me, but they also put me in direct facing of that feeling I love and fear so much–emptiness. The slight headache and lightheadedness, the almost trance-like state I touch when there came back to me in the wee hours of the morning when I sat, sipping hot broth laced with butter. My mind felt unusually clear, clear that this was a healing of a very old wound that my body had directed me to re-live.

At the end of the 24 hours, I did not uncontrollably spin into the throes of monk-like fasting–I welcomed a returning appetite and gleefully prepared my first solid but gentle meal, chewing the oatmeal groats with delight. Savoring the silky almond butter creaminess, the hints of cinnamon. And as I looked out upon a new day, I felt like I had accomplished something: gaining a newfound trust in self and body, and letting the fear of this animal that I am lessen in an exponential way.

Later, in my art process after experiencing this day, I drew all the various liquid things that came into my body to help me. I drew me, bent over with fear and pain, forced into this situation. I drew great waters, depths, and air. And I researched the magickal properties of liquid, of air, and of fasting…and found that not surprisingly they were all related to cleansing, soothing, clearing, making space for clarity.

This is a tricky concept for someone with a past with restrictive eating issues, but in the moment it felt right. That sometimes, this was called for, that sometimes, my body would ask it of me, and that sometimes I would have to discipline myself to return to full eating if the emptiness was not serving a healing purpose. Again, I thought back to the concept of Vision Questing, or in Norse animism, a concept called “Sitting Out” where a person goes out onto the land and fasts for a short time to receive clarity and wisdom. I drew myself as this person. With a coyote/paradoxical ability to walk this edge and with a knowing of my power of discernment to pull myself back from that edge into the fully embodied human world.

A healing experience indeed. Thank you, nausea, pain, fever. Thank you…my wise animal body.

*The actual memory that is next in my memoir is called “Meal Plan,” which I am tempted to skip over to get to the tasty McDonald’s one…but I think I’ll heed the somaticamagickal warnings of last week’s skippings and let that indeed be the memory for our next post. I hope you’ll join me for “Meal Plan.”

**If you’d like to learn more about the Food Memories book I am referencing for these posts, you can support a small bookstore by purchasing it here:

https://www.ebookwoman.com/book/9781689839075

or by searching for Food Memories by Reagan Lakins on any major book selling website.

Food Memory #9: Diet Entree (and The Frozen Food Cultural Wasteland)

Bright neon light

Activates at my arrival

And I am standing there

Just AI and I

It’s a familiar place

While I don’t often come to this door

The diet door

I’m in the freezer aisle often

Funny that I’m often also frozen

As I stand before the frosty items it holds

So many options

So many cold, cold options

I am overwhelmed

Numbers and grams

Bright perfect images screaming

This one! That one!

None of them really feeding what needs to be fed

No one is there with me

As I stand frozen at this door

Making choices, sometimes serious choices

Nothing

Except that neon something

That knows somehow

I am there

So this week I was a bit perplexed in how to re-enact my “Diet” food memory–one that was a basic description of the empty, tasteless immersion I had into the dieting lifestyle in my youth. I joined Weight Watchers with a friend when I was around fourteen years old, and don’t remember much of what I ate during those first pivotal months descending. The only thing I could think of was to go onto their site and see what meals they recommended.

What I found there was that Weight Watchers has now become a sort of digitalized coaching/phone tracking/food delivery system, very different than the in-person, come to the support group and get weighed kind of Weight Watchers I went to as a young woman. I found it interesting that as it was when I was a member, there seems to be no kind of warning or support regarding the possibility that an eating disorder could result from such endeavors. It’s almost as if that’s a shadow dream of its members, that only the lucky would be graced with such a thing.

I finally settled on looking up members’ favorite frozen meals so I could easily create a “diet eating experience.” Turns out Weight Watchers has its own line of frozen foods, Smart Ones, and I started there, with a backup of Lean Cuisine items if no Smart Ones could be found at my grocery store.

Now, I haven’t let myself look for diet entrees for a long time…in “recovery” it is shunned upon to choose these types of things. So it was a sort of novel experience, when I’m so used to being two doors down at the Organic meals door. New flavors and combinations I hadn’t reviewed a million times met my eyes and as usual I was overwhelmed with what to choose. As I didn’t want to eat non-organic meat in this experiment, the vegetarian limitations helped narrow it down but even then I met my familiar friend, choice anxiety. In these moments I look to numbers, I look to factual information to help me make some sort of logical decision as quick as possible so I don’t stand there forever looking like a weirdo.

The numbers and facts on these boxes shared a cold, hard truth with me, however–many of the meals were calorically the same as the organic ones I’ve been choosing instead all of these years. Aside from not supporting Nestle’ and GMO farming, really the boxes are the same…my life/eating box is the same. Ugh. Hard truth. I don’t eat the way I do to lose weight or because I think I’m a horrible person (it’s more about a fear of nausea and pain), but I can only tolerate “diet meal” caloric amounts all the same. Hmm.

So I chose a Lean Cuisine macaroni and cheese, hoping it would give me some semblance of flavor, and brought it to the register. While waiting, I realized that in this moment I had become one of “those women,” one that eats diet entrees alone in her apartment. The emptiness of that life! And somehow the organic meals I usually buy don’t advertise this sad truth as blatantly. Somehow, standing at the register with a Lean Cuisine macaroni and cheese seemed to yodel out this sorry state of affairs.

It made me think of how much I want to be a vibrant, voluptuous food-loving kitchen witch and how far I feel away from that reality, try as hard as I have to reach this seeming nirvana. It made me think of how many other women, men…teenagers even, who spend their lives eating out of these boxes, detached from cooking and growing food and laughing and enjoying hearty meals with others. It really did put me in a funk.

The eating experience was nothing to get excited about. Firstly, the meal was housed in a plastic bowl that prevented me from cooking it in the oven–it necessitated a microwave! Another layer of emptiness there. As I do not have one of these contraptions, I had to carve the orange frozen mass out of the plastic and into a pot to heat on the stove. I somehow managed not to burn the conglomoration, and sat down to experience it. All I can say was that it was pretty tasteless, I had to keep adding salt and at some point it reminded me of the macaroni and cheese one would eat out of a can. A slight plastic-y taste, and certainly no glorious crusty bits to enjoy. Just me and this yellow orange gloopy mass, alone in my apartment.

Afterwards, doing art in my journal, I couldn’t really shake this realization of the cold, frozen, sad and empty state of many eating these meals…of the disconnection both I and I’m sure many others are a part of, with their bodies, the soil, the cooking process, the joy and creativity available in this thing we call eating. There were a lot of blue tears, lines of frozen zombie women chasing after the “skinny” carrot. There was an image of that curvy wild woman, trapped behind bars. Of boxes and boxes and numbers and grams.

I may feel a whole lot different about myself, having worked on self-love and appreciation until it comes running out my ass, but the facts are still the same: I and a zillion others are caught in a food-cultural wasteland, wishing for other options but finding no support in facing the sheer deadening overwhelm of how to make that a reality. When measured products, programs and the Zeitgeist of weight loss surround us at every corner. Because the deeper importance of learning how to cook, grow food and spend quality time with others isn’t exactly K-12 education, because it is seen as “unempowered” to many to be in the kitchen….how we find ourselves here, frozen, in the frozen aisle.

*I am glad to say I will be returning to a more delicious memory next week: McDonalds’s. Please join me :}

**If you’d like to learn more about the Food Memories book I am referencing for these posts, you can support a small bookstore by purchasing it here:

https://www.ebookwoman.com/book/9781689839075

or by searching for Food Memories by Reagan Lakins on any major book selling website.

Food Memory #8: Pancakes, Hawaiian Gecko Medicine and Carrie (1976)

Masked and waiting

I order from the simple diner

One large pancake and eggs

Certainly not organic

I can’t see her smile as she hands the order to me

She’s too busy fielding walk-ins, phone orders and GrubHub

Things have changed so much since that first memory of pancakes.

I take them home, and open the steaming eco-container

Doughy goodness rises into my nostrils

Two packets of silver wrapped butter sit on top

Of a gigantic, head-sized pancake

I rush to remove them before an uncontrolled amount

Seeps out the edges of the foil

I cut the pancake into quarters

And lift one section to my plate

I cut a tiny wedge of this

And atop it, place a sliver of the butter

And a drizzle of fake maple syrup.

And then I shovel my fork under this gift,

Into my waiting mouth it enters

Onto my tongue where memories bloom

The entire congealed mass reminding:

Carefree innocence, buttery and sweet

Warm tropical breezes, soft and billowy

Cheerleading geckos

And those mean girls

The ones who penetrated me

Reflected back my pubescent portly appearance

And made it wrong

Made me wrong

Thier sneering, laughing, indifference

I remember

And suddenly the image of Carrie arises

Teased and traumatized

Thick pig’s blood dripping

And how instead of initiating me

Into unleashing anger and revenge

Onto the entirety of my external world

I began to wield my powers upon

My own self-destruction.

I chose this week to focus on my first memory of eating pancakes. The original memory took place in a restaurant on the island of Maui during a vacation with my mother. I remember the eating of these pancakes, their ooey gooey amazingness, but also the gecko on the wall beside me…my only real companion. Mom was sitting across the table smoking, drinking coffee and shielded behind a newspaper. Me and this gecko had a moment, I felt joy and companionship with the little creature.

I was fourteen years old and little did I know that shit was about to hit the fan in my life. I was just entering puberty and prior to this vacation had weathered yet another psychic pummelling by the mean girls at my middle school, teasing me about my weight. I was a kind of chunky kid, and taunts of me being pregnant and not being able to find pants that fit me sunk in deeper than I thought.

And here I was faced with enjoying these pancakes but also wondering whether I was fat, whether I was wrong. The gecko and his little pushups helped me not feel so bad, and I ate the pancakes, but still these psychic introjects/spells had begun worming their way into my self-esteem. It wouldn’t be too long after this moment that I would embark on that fateful choice to join Weight Watchers and enter into the downward spiral of Anorexia Nervosa (although I still wonder if that was the correct diagnosis for my symptoms/experience).

As I ate the pancakes for this week’s challenge, I remembered that time and never stopped to realize that Gecko was there with me, perhaps as a portent of the intensity to come. In some traditions the Gecko represents a protector spirit, especially the protector of homes, and I wondered if that Gecko was showing up to encourage me to not let my “home” be battered, to not choose to go down the depression path as a result of it. Seriously didn’t think about it until re-experiencing this meal. Hmm.

This meal was filled with more shame than others as I definitely acted like a weirdo in preparing it–only eating a quarter of the pancake, only have a bite of normally doused syrup/butter doughiness in fear of not knowing the calories or how it might make me full for too long. I ate my normal meal in addition to it, to get my needs in, but still felt like a little bit of a failure that I couldn’t just “let loose” and eat more of the pancake. I decided to step away from the shame and to appreciate my attempt to at least try to eat this that I would not normally eat.

I allowed myself that bite, and then ate the rest of the quarter pancake plain. I usually like pancakes plain but the contrast made this actually taste pretty gross, lifeless. I thought of how my life has been through such a cycle of life/death/joy-sucking processes, how this pancake tasted like how at times I’d been living.

All of this experience I had while choosing to rewatch Carrie (1976), and the symbology of the movie was more intense than I remembered. This was a favorite movie of mine as a kid, and it clearly made sense to me, now, watching it. Here was an incredibly sensitive young woman, basically isolated in her home with a scary mother, subjected to cruel teasings at school. Feeling like she wanted to die. But then the glorious feeling of power she experienced, of saying no to her mother, of destroying the school, etc. I’m sure my inner child was smiling at the fantasy of that.

As I ate the rest of my dry pancake, I felt great compassion for those young people being treated these ways, no matter what gender, for being sensitive, looking different, etc. It made me want to reach out to kids like that and be there with them, in a way I wished someone was there with me. Besides the Gecko, anyway. I was grateful for his little pushups and presence. But perhaps re-experiencing this meal awakened the part in me that needs most healing…and that part that might be able to offer compassion to others going through the same. I continued forward and in my art journal I drew the pancakes, I drew the blood, I drew the Gecko, and wrote all of the magickal correspondences for this amazing food. But still kept thinking about these kids, whether I was to find a way to help.

The familiar doubt arises as usual at that thought–how can I help others when I can’t even eat a whole fucking pancake? But still I let it linger and brew. We’ll see.

*Join me next week as I re-experience my next memory: “Diet.”

**If you’d like to learn more about the Food Memories book I am referencing for these posts, you can support a small bookstore by purchasing it here:

https://www.ebookwoman.com/book/9781689839075

or by searching for Food Memories by Reagan Lakins on any major book selling website.

Food Memory #7: Fried Hamburger and Po-Tay-Toes

The next memory re-lived is a simple meal of fried hamburger and potatoes. I can remember this meal, eaten alone at the table, while my mother smoked and drank gin behind me cutting coupons or something. I was pretty much always alone at the table, except for the rare Thanksgivings when my family actually chose to have the event at our small little apartment. I loved those years, having people in the seats around me, seeing them eat and enjoy it. So unusual it was for me.

So anyway, this time I purchased some beef and a small red potato for the experiment. I didn’t know what spices Mom put in the meal, so settled with what I had, salt and pepper. I couldn’t really figure out how to honor the original setting of my childhood home while re-experiencing the meal, as this is part of my project each time. So instead, I found myself researching magickal properties of the foods to give me some comfort and joy in cooking/eating them:

Beef: strength, abundance, fire, masculine, assertiveness, grounding

Potato: grounding, earth, feminine, safety, security, poppet/manifestation magic

Salt: Protection, cleansing

Pepper: Protection, exorcism, energy

Ah! Just the things I needed in my life, grounding and a little exorcism :} I lit a candle and, unlike my mother who probably was smoking and cursing whilst cooking, started to thank the elements of the foods as they sizzled and fried. I again imagined my little child sitting at the table, and me, actively putting good energy into her food and preparing to eat it with her. In my imagination, she was happy to not be alone. Because I am not really that skilled of a cook, the frying created a ton of smoke, so much I had to open all of the doors and windows of my little studio. Only as I made my way to the table, coughing, did I see the irony that indeed I had managed to create at least part of the original childhood environment–a smoke filled one!

Laughing and sitting down with this little girl in my mind, I found myself doing further research on potatoes, and of course came across Samwise Gamgee and his love of po-tay-toes. This put me in a cheery mood for the eating of the meal, singing “boil them, mash them, stick them in a stew!” whilst doing so. Singing this with my little girl, I imagined her to be Frodo, and me Samwise, getting through this intensity of a life together.

And then I let myself be very present with the tastes of the meal–the crisp, saltiness of the thinly sliced fried potatoes, the savory chewiness of the meat crumbling in my mouth. Mashing all together, I remembered this flavor being one of my favorites. No vegetables, not even ketchup–just the taste of fried beef, its fat and potatoes simmered to a crispy golden brown in it. It tasted so good.

But this time, the taste included something else. Or rather it was missing part of the original recipe–that is, it included a conscious love and was missing my mother’s cold and hollow grief, her drunkenness, her nicotine cloud infusion. I swear she injected all of that into my food. Not consciously, she really tried to love me. But with all that going on inside her, it’s no wonder I was eventually pulled to stop eating the food she served me.

But again, this time there was Samwise, chortling his song. There was me, cooking and chanting for strength and grounding and protection. There was me laughing at how unskilled of a cook I am, dancing in the haze of my own creations.

Afterwards, as I do each time, I sat down with my art journal. My artwork for this meal depicted more of a positive feeling–love beaming, smiles, and a whole array of colors which I have not used much in this process until now. Maybe that’s something. Maybe this experiment as a whole is doing more than just getting me to vary my diet, maybe it’s a deeper healing. My trusty skeptic doesn’t seem to think so, and that’s fine. For now I will carry on, just as those Hobbits did, to the next adventure.

*Join me next week for the next memory re-enactment: Pancakes :}

**If you’d like to learn more about the Food Memories book I am referencing for these posts, you can support a small bookstore by purchasing it here:

https://www.ebookwoman.com/book/9781689839075

or by searching for Food Memories by Reagan Lakins on any major book selling website.

The Void

There is a hollow core

Of liquid Nothingness inside me

Lashing waters of neverending grief

At lack of direction, spark

Identity, purpose, mission

I’d like to think

It a rumbling Darkness

One that’s initiating me

A Holy Womb of Void

And I, its holder

My only real assignment, as channel

To Be.

I’d like to think

This assignment

Is sacred

Given by the Highest of Orders

Divine and Boddhisatvic

Such is the fantasy nature of my mind.

But who the fuck am I

To carry such a thing?

It makes more sense to think that

What it feels like

When I’m full

Is vast and utter abandonment

Old ancestral feelings

Vast and utter loneliness

Vast and utter despair

That instead of Holy

There’s really just an echoing chamber of anger

At none in human form, but at Spirit itself:

WHY DON’T I HAVE DIRECTION?

WHERE IS MY HOLY PURPOSE?

WHY DO YOU NOT CHOOSE ME FOR A CLEAR MISSION?

WHY ARE YOU SO SILENT?

WHERE HAVE YOU GONE AND WHY HAVE YOU LEFT ME SO ALONE?

And then of course, I wonder

If its a Freudian thing

All about the absent father

A problem

Rather than a sacred thing

And I realize that regardless

Inside this vast and utter emptiness

Whatever it may be

There is something

It is my feeling

Perhaps my sacred feeling

A roiling despair

A roiling grief

A roiling bitterness

And the only direction

In this seemingly echoing desert, this pathless land

Is my pen, to express

This something

Of Nothing

I feel

When I’m full.

Food Memory #6: Scones, Gregorian Chants and Mother Loss

From Wikipedia:

“The origin of the word scone is obscure and may derive from different sources. That is, the classic Scottish scone, the Dutch schoonbrood or “spoonbread” (very similar to the drop scone), and possibly other similarly-named quick breads may have made their way onto the British tea table, where their similar names merged into one. Thus, scone may derive from the Middle Dutchschoonbrood (fine white bread), from schoon (pure, clean) and brood (bread),^[9][10] or it may derive from the Scots Gaelic term sgonn meaning a shapeless mass or large mouthful. The Middle Low German term schöne meaning fine bread may also have played a role in the origination of this word. And, if the explanation put forward by Sheila MacNiven Cameron is true, the word may also be based on the town of Scone (/skuːn/ (listen)) (Scots: Scuin, Scottish Gaelic: Sgàin) in Scotland, the ancient capital of that country – where Scottish monarchs were crowned, and on whose Stone of Scone the monarchs of the United Kingdom are still crowned today.^[11]“

The next food memory on my chronological tour is The Scone. First eaten at a quaint little bakery in the Diamond District of San Francisco with my uncle, I was probably about 10 years old and in awe of the whole situation. Being with a “father figure,” eating dainty fancy scones in a bakery, the sunny day outside the counter windows and the small bookstore across the street….all just dreamy compared to what I lived with back home with my mother. I’d started out the day with my auntie at the Chinatown Farmer’s Market, she showed me a connection and valuing of food I hungered for, and then to the Grace Cathedral where Gregorian Chanting filled the air. Then here with uncle, eating this heavenly morsel. This was an epic day. I think on some level eating this item tapped me into a sense based memory of my ancestors–Irish, Scottish, English, Wales–before I knew ancestry was a thing. All I know is paired with this scene I fell immediately in love with this type of pastry.

So my task this week was to re-create this moment to see what arose, a mighty challenge as all of these things are no longer what they were–cafes closed, Farmer’s Markets and Grace Cathedral sparsely dotted with the masked and anxious ridden. But I would try.

I purchased a raisin scone from the small market in town, and pulled up an image on my computer of the little bakery I once sat in with that uncle, who has now lapsed into dementia. I toasted the scone, and placed it in a ceramic bowl given to me by my auntie, also now lapsed into stage 4 cancer with no real verbal or mental abilities left. I began eating the scone. So perfect, the crisp outer denseness, collapsing into a steamy, soft, billowy center as I gently pulled it apart. I bit into the warmth, closed my eyes and enjoyed this taste experience. And then I put on the Gregorian Chanting.

Somehow, hearing these sounds opened another floodgate of grief within me. I began lamenting, truly feeling into the depth of loss I felt with my auntie’s condition–how, as a second mother to me, I was now losing her too. How just two years ago she danced around the room during Advent, this music playing. How after decades of being on the run from any family whatsoever, I was welcomed back into her arms after my mother died, no questions asked. How we stayed up late into the night talking about things I never knew about mom, about my childhood. She was helping me put some major puzzle pieces together. I cried about so much I don’t even know how to explain it. I think I cried the tears I should’ve cried when my mother passed, the deep deep ones that signify the true realization that something is just done, gone, ended and a void is all that is to be felt.

As I choked down that crumbly, slightly sweet deliciousness, I think I was also grieving for the opportunity to be a part of that day, so long ago, that rang of real family. Again, I don’t know how to describe that term, but it felt deep and like I was loved. “You belong to us,” I remember her saying to me, looking straight into my soul…and how those words reached around my heart and held it. While the doughy mass disintegrated on my tongue, I felt the awareness of how my uncle and auntie were both now almost gone and that sense of being a part of a “real family,” gone. Sloppy, snotty tears mingling with fading toasted buttery pastry scents, all of this mixed together.

Again I went to the art page and drew. Moons and broken hearts and tears and blues and Mama Mama Mama crying out for her loss. I let the feelings come, doing what I could to process them. Surprisingly, after the crying jags lessened, I found myself wanting more of the scone. I had cut it in half in case it made my stomach too full…and here was my stomach asking for more. Here was where I usually met the eating disorder thoughts. Should I or shouldn’t I push that risk of fullness?

Kind of scared and mistrusting, as usual I wasn’t sure my hunger was real or just emotional. Nevertheless I let myself eat one more bite just to honor the possibility that my hunger telling the truth. To be the mom, or the auntie or the uncle to that little kid in me that so badly wants them to eat a scone in a bakery with me again, now. I closed my eyes and visualized her in the bakery, sitting alone at the window, sadness in her eyes. Wondering where everyone was, who would come and eat with her. I imaged myself walking in the door and pulling up a seat next to her saying, “Hey. I’m here with you. Always.”

She looked up at me and smiled.

*Join me next week as I head into the next food memory: Fried Hamburger and Potatoes.

**If you’d like to learn more about the Food Memories book I am referencing for these posts, you can support a small bookstore by purchasing it here:

https://www.ebookwoman.com/book/9781689839075

or by searching for Food Memories by Reagan Lakins on any major book selling website.

Food Memory #5: Manifest Your Goals With Grilled Cheese

Photo by Aleksandar Pasaric on Pexels.com

Sizzling sourdough scenting

Oozing golden innards cascading

Crisp textures collapsing

Savoring, savoring

Taking in the Sun

Crafting up my Will

Chewy, gooey

Salty, creamy deliciousness

Sliding across tastebuds

And into waiting core

It was a sunny day, as I remember, in her house. Everything was colored cream, or light beige and there were doilies everywhere. She was a friend of my mother’s and she was in the kitchen, with me. I was not alone in the kitchen, but as usual my mother was not there.

I was standing on a chair in front of her stove, and she was guiding me step-by-step in how to make a perfect grilled cheese sandwich (not with an iron, BTW). Her hair was white, billowy, curly. She had a kind look in her eyes, I could feel the gentleness of her heart as she spoke to me. Don’t ask how an eight year old knows these things, they just do. Especially with contrast.

This is the next memory I chose to re-create, now in my 40’s, to see what would happen. I’m not exactly sure why I am going through these memories again but it is driving me nonetheless. Driving me to feel, perhaps?

Last week’s memory was a challenging one, bringing up many of those pesky feelings, but this week felt a little lighter. I’m not a gluten/dairy/fat-o-phobe, so all of the ingredients indeed felt wholesome and nourishing to me. My preparation of the meal was joyful–music playing, a candle lit, dancing while entertaining the magickal qualities of the foods as the shimmering pan sizzled. Nourishment, creation, grounding, kinship, bringing good things together, manifestation.

I even attempted to carve a rune into the bread while cooking–as part of me laughed at the thought, another part of me allowed the play. The rune was Berkana, which according to whispersofyggdrasil.blogspot.com, means “a time of personal growth is on the way. This may involve material, domestic or – by far the most likely possibility – spiritual affairs, because Berkana is also associated with intuition, the higher self and the soul’s purpose on earth.” This is a deep desire of mine lately, to really get clearer on my Service path. So I thought it might be interesting to call that in whilst cooking my meal.

When I sat down to eat it, I found myself watching a YouTube video on how to create teaching videos…not the most sacred of settings but seemed related to feeding my desire to learn how to be more active in offering my services to the world. There were only feelings of enjoyment and satisfaction during the eating, no sad tear-filled reviews of lost childhood. It was actually really good, and made me wonder why I haven’t made this meal for myself more often.

But of course, about a 1/2 hour after eating, my stomach started cramping in weird ways. I’ve had all of the tests for allergies so at least medically I’m not supposed to be having reactions to these foods. So I wondered of all the different reasons my stomach would be cramping after eating this. And I tried not to wonder. I found myself sliding down the slippery slope of frustration and disappointment, of wondering whether this whole experiment thing was a stupid joke. Ah the lovely voice of skepticism, it does like to enter in at times like this!

Luckily I have enough consciousness to know that these are just feelings. And that they will pass. Especially if I do not attribute them to anything in particular, but rather let them be, do some art with them, and watch as they pass as clouds. Which I did, and they did.

Is there gargantuan meaning to this project I am choosing to undertake and share with you each week? Maybe. Maybe not. Yet I’m trying to have fun with it, and trying to let my simple desire to do such lead where it will lead. I’m of course hoping that there will be some sort of golden, crispy, delicious crescendo at the culmination of this collective project, leading me to my soul service in the world. And hell, if we want to believe in astrology, I’m a Capricorn…which basically says I can’t just eat a damn cheese sandwich without wondering about what it might mean lol. Where’s the meaning? Where’s the goal it will accomplish?

I have to laugh at myself, and at our minds as a species, sometimes. That seems to be the best medicine. And art. And delicious food, no matter what. So I’ll keep going, even if it is a stupid joke. I am eating and exploring and not dying. That’s got to count for something. Next week, I shall re-experience a scone. Won’t you join me?

*Seriously, the blog post that inspired this title exists. It is an actual description of using the eating of grilled cheese sandwiches. If you’re interested, here’s the link: https://plentifulearth.com/manifest-goals-grilled-cheese-spell/

**If you’d like to learn more about the Food Memories book I am referencing for these posts, you can support a small bookstore by purchasing it here: https://www.ebookwoman.com/book/9781689839075 or by searching for Food Memories by Reagan Lakins on any major book selling website.

Food Memory #4: Vending Machine Chicken Noodle Soup

slippery

slurping

salty

sweet?

chunky

chicken

chewy

noodles

undercooked…

steamy

tendrils

savory

but empty

chemical

wire versus cloth mother

alone in the kitchen

greyhound bus stations

fending for myself

i can’t even finish

the grief comes in waves

and makes chewing swallowing impossible

I turn to Her

Well this food memory was less enjoyable than the ones I’ve done so far. Who knew vending machine chicken soup could do such a thing?

First of all, the hunt for vending machines serving this stuff yeilded pretty much nil. Nowhere serves this crap anymore, so my next best option was to get the instant Lipton Chicken Noodle Soup in a box. I tried to not look at the back of the box but of course I did, and saw all the lovely chemicals that would swim in the concoction I was to challenge myself with.

This challenge came with emotion. The first wave delivered from the (continued) realization that I sought out and liked this mechanically produced, dead food as a child. That I actually preferred it to the rare times my mother would cook. If you know anything about the (cruel) Harlow monkey experiments,* I certainly thought of them in relation to this situation.

Why was that? Perhaps energetically at least the vending machine wasn’t full of rage and grief whilst cooking so therefore it wouldn’t get transferred into the food and into my body. Much magickal thinking in my head as a child. Perhaps my mom was just a bad and rare cook, but nonetheless, it brought up tears to think I’d choose this powdered empty food rather than real food.

The second wave of emotion came when I was researching the magickal properties of chicken noodle soup. In every post I reviewed, most of the magick centered on the vitality and strength building properties of the whole food ingredients in the soup–carrots, onions, garlic, chicken–and try as I did, I just couldn’t transfer such qualities to this dehydrated substance. I really wanted to, to re-craft this soup into something beauteous, but I just couldn’t. The kitchen witch sites also listed the ingredient of “grandma’s love” or “a mother’s love” as one of the healing ingredients and for reasons already mentioned this just made that less possible.

I’m pretty good at kicking myself out of emotional doldrums but this time I let myself feel it all. I put on some boiling water for the “soup” and pulled up pictures of Greyhound Bus stations to look at whilst eating as this was where the original memory unfolded. I let myself feel my sadness, remembering that kid in the bus station, as I smelled the savory fake broth I poured into my cup. I let myself taste the taste that seemed nourishing to me as a kid, that was my only comfort back then in that cold station waiting for my uncle to pick me up. But when I bit into the not quite cooked noodles, I just lost it. Gross. Fake. Sad. Why did I find this delicious then? Sad, sad, sad. Just let myself feel it. But the rest of the “soup” was left unfinished. I turned from my cup and went straight to the art page to process and let tears come.

Although this experiment was a bummer, I’m letting myself believe that it was a perfect thing. That this urge to re-live these memories is designed to put me in touch with these feelings, and to allow me to process them, perhaps exorcising them for a final time. I look ahead and brace myself for the range of emotions I might feel as I re-experience more of my tastebuds’ recollection of those times.

Thanks for coming along with me on this journey. I hope it is inspiring some of your own food memories. Next up: Grilled Cheese Sandwich…

*If you want to know more about the monkey experiments on attachment, you can find that information here : https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/obsonline/harlows-classic-studies-revealed-the-importance-of-maternal-contact.html#:~:text=Based%20on%20this%20observation%2C%20Harlow,rubber%20and%20soft%20terry%20cloth.

Food Memory #3: Wild Onion and Wood Sorrel Faeries

Wood Sorrel Fairy, c1930 by Cicely Mary Barker

The next food memory that comes to mind chronologically, is one of eating what as a kid I used to call “Sourgrass.” There was a big forest next to our apartment and within it lived many species of plants I came to know as friends. Sourgrass was the only one I remember eating, however, but I used wild onion all the time to spread over my forts for protection.

So anyhow, this being my next memory I set out into the woods near my current home looking for the Sourgrass. Quite challenging as it is winter here and the plant’s fleshy flower stems don’t come up until springtime. But I did manage to find wild onion spears shooting up from the earth, as well as a bed of spindly clover-ish leaves of the Sourgrass growing short to the wintery ground. I plucked some of the latter and stored it in my pocket for eating later…as unlike the pristine forests of yore, the roadside foraging requires some washing to avoid urine and other such matter to not be ingested 😛

While walking with these leaves in my pocket, I felt a little lighter for some reason, a little playful. I was drawn back to remembering how much I loved foraging and playing in the forests as a kid, one of my safe places. I was curious to see what the research/eating/art journal exercise would bring forward.

At home, I did the eating first. Such a tiny little thing, this cloverish stem, rolling around in my mouth. Nothing like the thick juicy stems of springtime, but when I bit down into it, that familiar sharpness rang through my cheeks. The taste of childhood forests. Ahh.

Researching next, I was reminded that this plant is actually called Wood Sorrel, of the Oxalis family of plants. But a few lines down into my reading, I noticed it was also called “fairy bells” and was commonly connected to the fae folk, elves and woodland spirits. The image above depicts the supposed fairy that hangs out with the Wood Sorrel, from the 1930’s. When I saw this image I felt a resonance with this part of me that has always been a kin to these creatures, and I found it quite interesting that it was such a strong memory in my head, that it stuck around for all these decades, here to remind me again. Hmm.

Overall the experience of this food challenge was kind, sweet and of good energy. Adding a sprig of grass to my meal plan isn’t something triggering to my issues with fullness, but it did bring me back to a window of joy I experienced as a child…and how the plants helped me with that. Upon further research I found that energetically this plant was associated with Venus, the element of earth and had in the past been used for protection for the troubled heart.

As far as wild onion, its main energetic kitchen witchy property is protection. From negativity…and especially from demons! I wonder if that’s why it felt so good to be around them as a child, why I was moved to use them as protection for my forts, as I was pretty much dealing with demons back home.

Thanks, Wood Sorrel and Wild Onion, for reminding of the companionship you offered me as a child. And for showing me how I can connect with you and that simple joy now…so many years later.

Next week, I will aim to find and experience vending machine chicken noodle soup, my next memory. Does that even exist anymore??? We shall see.

*Food Memories, by Reagan Lakins is available on all major book sales sites should you choose to dive more deeply into her tales of food, body and memory.

Find it here on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1689839074?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860