When life gives you cabbages, make kimchi.
I’ve lost myself into a wild sort of cathartic kitchen processing this week. I’ve just made my first batch of (literally kilos of!!) whole cabbage Kimchi.
Just like they used to in the 1930’s, when Korean women first entered market places to sell it, despite the shame it brought on their family (a woman working), they had no other choice. It was that, or watch their families starve and die under Japanese colonial oppression.
I’m also fermenting sourdough, labneh, various drinks, olives, pickles.
There are visions of a little cart that I can walk around to my neighbours with a huge pot of kimchi and slop my quarter-cut chilli cabbages onto a little piece of brown paper and trade it for some fresh laid eggs.
The creative surge after birth… and death, is real.
My darling step-mama, took her final earthly breaths a week ago tonight.
A day, and weeks, I am not sure I will ever stop reliving in my mind.
I found watching someone you love literally pass over in front of you… otherworldly.
I just tried typing a few sentences to capture the essence of some of what I’ve experienced in the last two to three weeks. But it felt deeply not-right each time. It’s too soon, and too private, for me. I am also still deeply in it, and I feel that special place of perspective is potentially still many months, or even years away.
I’m trying not to agitate my post-traumatic growth disorder.
There is no rush to be “healed”, today.
One of my treasured soul sisters reminded me simply that when we are faced with the impermanence of life, we either move closer to God, or try to grasp stronger onto the material world.
I’ve witnessed this paradox strongly around me, and even within me.
I have had to dig the deepest parts of my inner well as I run, like a hurdle jumper, through daily (sometimes hourly) initiations.
Resilience.
Alchemising grief and trauma, into its truth - compassion, peace and oneness.
For there is no separation.
The separation is all but a veil. Separation of each other, separation of body and spirit, separation of light and dark, joy and suffering, self-responsibility and insidious selfishness, life and death.
My darling step-mum made kimchi once. I’m not sure if she ever made it again afterwards. But I was there just after her first batch was “ready”.
I’m not sure if she had the right (and highly necessary) gochugaru chilli required to make it. I think she might have used a substitute, like cayenne. Most recipes usually call for quite a lot of gochugaru. Which is very mild and slightly sweet like paprika, and creates an Unami taste and beautiful red colour. When substituting for other chillis (not recommended), you need to use much less. Probably about a teaspoon of cayenne, equivalent.
I don’t know what happened, but I think she used about two cups of cayenne.
And so, of course, it was completely inedible.
But it was hilarious.
We tried so hard to eat it and show our appreciation for her effort. But we couldn’t. We had to spit it out and get a firehose instead!
She was, otherwise, an amazing cook. In the height and freedom of her full life-force, it was her greatest joy and simplest honour to spend hours in the kitchen preparing a beautiful meal to serve her family around the dinner table in the evening.
She gifted me my love for food and cooking, amongst a million other treasures.
Perhaps that’s why I’ve retreated to the kitchen this week.
Searching for reminders of her. Searching for my life’s path and purpose in the blurriness of my experience right now. I picked up a book of mine, Grown & Gathered, by Matt and Lentil. Instantly I felt a “ahh yess… this is what it’s about”.
Returning to the source.
Returning to life in it’s simplicity.
Playing with the alchemy of life.
Typical Scorp: the alchemists of the zodiac.
The day before last, I popped over to my neighbours to teach their homeschooled teenage daughter how to make butter. Not as a “home economics” lesson, but more of a science lesson in alchemy.
That magic sweet spot where just like that, the cream cannot hold on any longer, and boom, it separates into butter and buttermilk.
I love that. I love it so fucking much.
It’s literally magic for me, watching that process.
Of course homemade butter is divine to eat. But for me, it’s about indulging in the magic of the process. The alchemy of life.
Transforming and transmuting from one form to another, with energy.
Moving closer to God.
This morning, laying in bed with my family, one of my uber privileged children was complaining about something they didn’t have. I know in conscious parenting worlds, we’re to believe that “complaining” is a form of feeling powerlessness and so we need to validate them etc… but in this instance, all could say to her was —
My love, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
My husband joked at me - or cabbages, make kimchi.
Resilience.
How full circle it felt.
My 3 year old daughter naturally had no idea what I was talking about. But she did say excitedly - we have lemons! I love lemonade. Can we make lemonade?
I shot myself in the foot a little there. It was 6am, and I did not want to make lemonade.
These times have reminded me of one of my favourite books called Pachinko.
It’s about a Korean matriarch who faces unfathomable trauma and ends up living in the slums of Japan, stateless, pregnant, during the Japanese colonial rule. Living through countless wars, extreme poverty, the victim of hate crimes, and more. Yet, she endured.
She endured, and rose. It wasn’t a pretty story. It was a real one. She doesn’t magically “make it through”. There is hardship the whole way along, even when she’s a grandmother and her material situation had improve later in life - gambling “pachinko” parlous, yakuza, suicides, AIDS.
It’s a compelling story and I learnt a lot from this book.
Historical fiction with a female protagonist, is one of my love languages for sure.
One of the parts I found most interesting was that there was a time in Korea and Japan, where all food was ordered to go to the Emperor. Many Koreans suffered an enormous famine. However, they had cabbages (not seen as a delicacy to the Emperor). No rice. But cabbages.
They fermented this cabbage with salt, fishy things and chilli, and made Kimchi.
The lived off kimchi for years, and it became the national Korean dish.
Actually, Kimchi has been an important part of Korean culture since before Jesus, and turns out is actually quite a political food.
Nowadays, there are still many of “these women” of whom the story was based around. Stateless Koreans living in Japan. Born as early as 1917. Still alive today (that’s 105 years old FYI). Still thriving, happy, physically and mentally strong, getting by simply loving their great great grandchildren.
It made me think about resilience.
Whilst I don’t wish for myself or my family to have to endure such hardship, I do wish us to have that kind of resilience.
These last few weeks have tested my own resilience.
Not my physical hardship resilience, but my spiritual resilience.
My kimchi-quest this week has been partly about curiosity, as I wanted to try “the original whole cabbage kimchi”, rather than the modernly available chopped and diced one, and partly quest for playing in the alchemical realms of connection, purpose and inner resilience.
It will be ready in 5 days.
One the other side of this Scorp-Taurus fuelled Lunar Eclipse.
The resilience grand finale hurrah.
So pop on over if you’re local with something to trade, some brown butchers paper, and I’ll slop you the most divine, God-filled fermented cabbage you’ll have ever eaten..
No firehose required, this time.