How many bodies go into making your body every day?
Nourishment is a nested process. The rivers in our landscapes affect the microbes in our guts, and vice-versa. Therefore, nourishing our own aliveness requires nourishing the aliveness of all the beings that go into becoming us, on every level.
Aliveness Kitchen is a context for the community tending of aliveness.
Aliveness is emergent. We can imagine and predict what might happen next, but we can’t know all of it. If we are committed to aliveness, by definition we must also commit and support ourselves to thinking and noticing and acting outside of the patterns that we’re accustomed to. We prepare to be surprised.
This is different from “leaving things to their own devices.” Aliveness Kitchen is not a system of control, but it is an ecosystem of intentional endeavor: many beings working together to recognize and tend their mutual well-being.
Aliveness Kitchen attends to the energetics of things, not just to the material form. We’re attending to how patterns move in our bodies, physical and emotional, and how they move through our relationships — with our microbiomes, with our inner selves, with our ancestors (including the plant and animal beings that will literally become us), with our communities, with the places where we live.
The aliveness of the system is our real work in the world.
As a culture, we have abstracted work away from the direct contact with the living world and its beings. What if that’s turned on its head? What if work, instead — where most of us spend most of our time — is the place where we get to come back into contact with other beings? And, since the natural world is a place of emergence and unpredictability, work therefore becomes the place where we can practice being open and creative together, where the not-knowing is a source of curiosity and opportunity instead of fear and contraction?
What if we create intentional working environments, communities of relationship, that are supportive and encouraging of our following our aliveness wherever it may take us, as it rises and falls in full life cycles?
What if work literally nourished us? What if there were an Aliveness Kitchen — a space to recognize and practice nested kinship and interdependence — at the center of every workplace?
Not incidentally, this would create a structural shift in how we approach food systems transformation. Instead of, say, trying to bring new foods to market, we would instead center relationship with the aliveness of ourselves, each other, and the more than human world. All of this, literally, becomes part of our work.
We start with death and the nourishment we need to transform.
Our bodies are nourished — literally, physically — by other bodies. Those transformations are deeply significant in that they are the ending of one life so that it can become another life: a full life cycle of creativity.
In order to create the new structural and societal bodies, the new bodies of work, the new idea bodies that we need, we must begin by dismantling existing patterns that don’t support aliveness.
This means that Aliveness Kitchen properly begins as we move into winter. We don’t start with big output; that’s the old pattern. Instead, we start quietly, within ourselves, noticing where we find friction and where we can let things soften and go to compost.
By being in regular practice during the fallow months, including deep rest and attention to nourishment, we make space for new things, truly new things, to express in the spring.
Interested in sponsoring a year-long cohort of practice? Please be in touch.
