Food, Ceremonies and Turning Towards: Robert Reese
by Robert Reese
The thin winter light through the garden brings clarity to leaves, grass and the pine needles outside. A large window frames a swath of Monterey Pines, their color the dark green of dreams. This time of the year, the delicate light is allowed only a brief few moments of the day. In twenty minutes the sunlight will turn sallow and muted. The woman and I read half a page of poetry and the afternoon is already ancient. An eternity--and an instant--if you have cancer. She sitting on her bed dressed in a blue patient’s smock, tethered to an inclined IV pole. The room smells faintly of disinfectant, flowers and water color paint.
I am the woman’s chaplain today. And, though an Episcopalian, she does not seem to mind my Zen affiliation. She has just been served lunch and we are talking about food. Surprisingly, food is one of four things she responds to. The other three are friends, art and religious ceremonies, in no particular order.
However, we are not talking about art or friends or religious ceremonies or her current lunch, which appears pale and washed-out in color. Rather, we are speaking of previous meals she has made, or taken with someone: bright plates of fruit that seemed to be vessels of light, as if by pressing it to the roof of her mouth would release the generous quality of illumination. She picks at the pink salmon and red-skinned potatoes, set-off by the parsley’s green--but there is not joy in her meal today. Joy, if it enters this room at all, comes from the love of friends, from the human communion. But friends and family are not in her room today. They have not been, nor likely will be soon. I have been the only visitor in the past three days.
We both find ourselves talking slowly and carefully, occasionally glancing out the windows to the terraced landscape which is full of pines and blue sky.
I’m wondering if she has lost the aspiration to live. Sometimes when patients loose the will to live they literally and figuratively turn toward the wall. Instead of facing the room and life, they shift and face the wall. The reorientation is generally not an encouraging sign and seems to suggest her expectations toward life have reached an ebb.
When I speak her eyes dart to the window and the trees, as if noticing their presence for the first time and finding cues and stories in their branches. She eats slowly, as if she were treating the food as sacrament.
Over the course of a week, I am encouraged by her attention to meals. Her contemplation of lunch has shifted. Over the past weeks she seems to have taken on Dogen Zenji’s dictum to view everything that comes to her “like an oven.“ The oven does not discriminate or have preferences; it accepts everything without partiality and transforms it to the energy to cook rice. Pleasure, sadness, success, love and pain—all different kinds of firewood come into the ovens of our life.
Without saying as much, she seems to have adopted the spirit “to live until you die.” She has begun painting again, bright water colors which she gives to the nursing staff. There are also stories with each painting: what watercolor each nurse is to receive and why.
In the absence of friends and her increased interest in food, she has become curious about the enactment of ceremonies: ceremonial dining, ceremonial living, ceremonial dying. The word “ceremony” (Latin: caerimonia) is related to “cura,” or “cure,” the act of healing or being healed—to make healthy, sound or whole. By enacting a ceremony there is the suggestion that something is being healed in and through the activity.
It occurs to me that her art-making has taken-on a ceremonial aspect in her own healing: brushes carefully laid out by size, watercolor paper from spiral binders and tubes of watercolor arrayed; plastic cups for mixing arranged in descending order. Then the steady laying-down of secondary color in broad, careful strokes, specks and glints of color, highlights of teal and amber appearing against the stratified layers of pigment. Sweeps of color, airy washes—the entire work intimate, hand-made and child-like. Stirring the water and pigment, the attention, precision and acuity. And with these—at least on this winter afternoon—care and turning toward and possibility.
