mental health

The Rites of the Sanctuary

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There are times when I walk into the winery kitchen in the morning, punch in, get to my bench, and my ritual feels a bit like rehearsing into a mirror in public. It’s for no one’s benefit but mine, and others either don’t care or pretend not to see and be curious. It’s still important because beyond the centering, grounding aspects of the act, it’s how I belong to myself.

The routine of the morning grows ignominiously but slowly. I come in, punch in, put my stuff down on the bench and decide what needs to be out and what needs to be in the locker. Going over the prep sheet and whiteboard is next. If something fucked up after I left the day before (or will fuck up without my immediate intervention,) that’s where I’ll find it. Make a plan for the day, then the coffee I’ll never drink. Check the covers for the day, then back to the office for emails on what amounts to the professional version of gossip. Very little of it has anything to do with me or requires my attention yet, and if things got really bad on the pastry station, that’s how I’ll find out.

Back to the kitchen. Temperature logs handed down by the higher-ups, then my ritual and work begins.

I put on my coat, check my tools, scale the first recipe, and consecrate what is still My Place in this world- laboratory, dojo, and sanctuary.

Animated GIF from Disney’ “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” showing Quasimodo defiantly lifting Esmeralda’s unconscious body while yelling “Sanctuary” at the city.
Not quite like that, but still an epic moment in the movie.
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Overdue Epilogues

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CW: Discussion of health, weight, body image, diet

A few years back, I wrote a book- my first book, in fact– about losing weight and getting in shape. I used my own story, half-baked methods, understanding and experience to explain just how I did it. For the time, it was all good advice. What I failed to mention, however, is what can happen when your health, your brain, and forces your can’t hope to control take your feet out from under you.

It’s easy and glib to say “Keep trying, don’t give up, tomorrow’s another day” and the rest. It’s true as well, but it’s not the whole truth. Life comes at you fast.

Consider this post and a few others before, then, as something like an epilogue to “Blood, Sweat, and Butter.” Marie Kondo famously recanted some of her tidiness dictums because she realized that they aren’t possible for someone with kids, like she became after writing her books. I’m not necessarily recanting anything I wrote… but I’m definitely throwing up a few asterisks.

The front cover of "Blood, Sweat, and Butter- Getting Fit on a Cook's Schedule (and Paycheck)
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Gaps in the Armor

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The right food at the right time can give you nearly everything you need. In my case, I was back at the Beer Bus and had just pounded a tuna burrito from Saint Burrito. The balled-up tinfoil and a stained napkin were being held down by what remains of my beer.

I had just come out of the gym and needed a late lunch/ refuel. Protein, carbs, a bit less fat than your normal burrito, and 5% alcohol to help soothe the muscles. Beer doesn’t get enough credit as a post-workout beverage if it’s consumed within reason. John L. Sullivan, the legendary “knock out king” of 19th Century Boston, had an equally legendary drinking problem. All his work and fighting couldn’t keep his daily Kidney Pickling from turning his muscles slack and flabby. “Moderation in everything, including Moderation,” says verbal knock-out king Oscar Wilde.

A suit of armor on a black-gray vignette background
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Half-Rest

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“Music is the space between the notes.”

Claude Debussy

The slow season has finally come.

The boss kepts saying words like “slow down, take a breath, relax a bit…” but the schedule and production weren’t bearing that out, and if you’d asked any of my coworkers, they’d have said it felt like we’d been sprinting since June.

Over post-shift beer, my buddy Nick- the lead prep cook- and I compared what was to be our third holiday season at the winery with the previous two and tried to get our hands around the situation.

“It’s fucking insane…” Nick said, tipping back his pint of amber lager and sucking a little foam off his mustache. “We’re doing business and a lot of it, that’s for sure- but not that much more than last year. Events has a full roster, but prep is still short at least one person. We were short last year too though, so what the hell is it?”

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Between the Mountain and the Sea

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“A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being. If he would not be a stick whirled and whelmed in the stream, he must be the stream itself, all of it, from its spring to its sinking in the sea.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

“And Slid said: “I am the Lord of gliding waters and of foaming waters and of still. I am the Lord of all the waters in the world and all that long streams garner in the hills; but the soul of Slid is in the Sea. Thither goes all that glides upon Earth, and the end of all the rivers is the Sea.”

Excerpt From The Gods of Pegana,
Lord Dunsany

It’s a windy and cold morning on the shore. I’m out walking the beach down by the water, where the tide turns the sand from soft tan to slate gray and my boots leave footprints. It’s easier-going for older people who are out with their dogs. The dogs, for their part, don’t seem to mind the going or the feel of the cold sand; they’re high as kites on all the smells and feeling carried on salt air and the ability to run.

In a few hours, I’ll be on a plane back to Oregon. Back to my wife and cat, our basement apartment up a mountain, and eventually a kitchen that’s felt more like a psych ward the last few months than the serene kind of chaos I want to believe I work in.

Those LeGuin and Dunsany quotes slide through my mind along with “A Pirate Looks at 40.” It feels silly and dramatic and florid, but I don’t really care. Finding a bench on the pier where my grand-uncle once tried to teach me to fish, I could almost cry.

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