Alchemic Verse

There’s a blend of ingredients that make up a life, simmered by the heat of living. A soup well-lived requires being deliberate about the ingredients, the ratios, and the seasonings held in balance with the changing of the seasons. One season calls for hearty root vegetables, barley and cream, another for cooled tomato, bell pepper and sherry. Some ingredients stay – both may benefit from garlic – and other ingredients change to suit the occasion.

Life differs from soup in that there is truly no recipe to be followed that will suit each individual person, let alone across that person’s seasons of living. We add an ingredient, let it simmer, give it a taste, and balance it as needed with another. Maybe we love an ingredient and add more, and more, discovering over time that the texture is off, that the other ingredients can’t be tasted anymore, or that the more we eat, the more our stomach starts to hurt.

Sometimes we add an ingredient that ruins what we were making – bananas ain’t for soup – and what was a soup becomes a science experiment, a bizarre and inedible potion. Sometimes difficult experiences can bring it to boil, disintegrating some of the softer ingredients, and in the worst instances boiling it over the top. There are moments where with determination that soup can be balanced again. The bravest of people know when to empty the pot, clean it out, and start fresh.

Thinking of my own life as soup, the ingredients take shape as experiences, relationships and habits. Being newly deliberate has meant asking myself hard questions. What is in this pot? Is this right for this season of my life? Is there space for the ingredients I truly desire? What ratios are off, with some tastes overpowering others? Have I been holding back from adding ingredients in fear they might not work? Did I try to follow someone else’s recipe? Is it time to start a new soup…

A spirit of admirable but misplaced determination has repeatedly seen me trying to balance too much salt with sugar or lemon juice, trying to get accustomed to or cover tastes I didn’t like. I would hide in the kitchen, crying over the pot, stirring late into the night to make it work, blaming the stove, the season, my hands, my tastebuds, myself. I was afraid to empty the pot, believing it would mean I’d failed and that starting over would be too hard – surely, I would fail again. And overtime, it boiled over, charring the bottom, leaving no other option.

Imagining the seasons as chapters in my book, each soup has become a Part or Act. Having recently started a new soup, it begins with the base, balancing broth, stock, and/or dairy – living conditions, base wellness, fundamental requirements met. The next stage where I currently stand at the edge is daunting – what should the primary ingredients be? This looks like taste-testing ingredients, new hobbies, new people, new places. It also involves determining what previously-enjoyed ingredients if any can form the new soup, deciding what might upset the balance, and what might just be a banana.

As always I share this without an attitude of preaching – my soup might look nothing like your soup, and I surely don’t have the arrogance to assume I know the right ingredients for anyone else. All I hope to impart is an analogy and a perspective – consider what’s in your soup.

If the soup doesn’t taste right, if the balance is off, if you don’t have room for the ingredients you hunger for, try for a new ratio or shift the flavor with a pinch of sugar.

If you’re hiding weeping in the kitchen, if you don’t like what you’ve made, if it’s making you sick, and if it’s boiling over, honor when it was good, and bravely feed it to the drain.

No matter what, never give up on cooking.