Prescribed Burn

On the cave that unmade me, the woman I couldn't find in myself, and the waters waiting to do it again

The cave was barely big enough for two bodies, much less the three of us that were laying there…side by side, naked and face down on the cool ground.

Hot coals on the side…branches laid underneath us…the sha-woman and me, and the door sealed behind us somewhere between one life and another. She began to pour water on the coals, slowly at first. The steam rose and enveloped; the thick heat pressed down on everything…my chest, my face, my hands, the soft places behind my knees. I didn’t know heat could feel like that…not hot-shower heat or even midsummer-NYC heat…this was a heat that reached inside of you and sat there, melting it all away.

She started to pray. I didn’t understand the words…they were in Zapotec, her indigenous language…but I felt each of them as they settled in my bones and warmed me from within. She prayed the old stuff out…the patterns, the ways of holding too tightly, the weight of grief I’d been carrying for so long. She beat our bodies with the branches…not hard…more like shaking loose…and the sweat came in waves. My eyes burned. My body poured everything it had been holding out through my skin. She scrubbed us with a pumice stone…the dead skin, flecks of the cages we had built around us; she scraped it all away. My skin felt raw and new and tender underneath. And then she cooled the coals, rinsed us clean, and we crawled out into the night air of Teotitlán del Valle…covered in blankets, beanies pulled over our wet heads…our bodies trying to remember what temperature meant.

I felt lighter…I felt freer. I also felt SO very nauseous…I thought I might collapse.

They helped me to the ground outside. I lay there in the cool Oaxacan night, a blanket over my shoulders, my body still catching up to what had just happened…lightheaded, my stomach rolled, and I felt so sick…so undone. I felt an uneasiness like my body was processing something too big to absorb easily or cleanly. The air eventually came back into my lungs…the cool, fresh, smoke-and-earth air of that village at night…and my stomach settled slowly, and in its place came the most complete sense of renewal I have ever felt.

I was made new in that cave…something cleared out of me that had been taking up space I needed back.

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I had come to Oaxaca in pieces.

Newly divorced, I had just stepped down from the restaurant to navigate single motherhood with my daughter, and I took what seemed like a perfectly serendipitous opportunity…culinary director and head chef at a trio of West Village cafés…a beautiful title, a role I said yes to because of the single mother and business owner who invited me in. It looked, from the outside, like the next right move. And at first, it was…it really was…daytime hours, done at 5pm, some of the coolest co-workers, beautiful souls and cafes I could create menus for…even debuting my signature grits bowl for the West Village community. I loved it…that is, until it turned out to be one of the most toxic work environments I had ever stepped into. A female-owned space that should have felt like home, and instead felt like a slow disappearing. Every week, I was a little less myself as more and more was asked of me without compensation for the extra work. Every month, I was a little more uncertain whether the chef I had been even existed anymore.

And that uncertainty underneath it all…was the guilt about the restaurant. I had left because Millie needed me…that was the truth…it was the only reason I needed, and I knew it. But professionally, it felt like a mistake I was still paying for…like I had handed something back that I wasn’t sure I could get again.

Lauren has known me long enough (since high school!) and had watched me long enough to know exactly what I needed. What I needed…was to move. Something deep inside me has always known how to survive through motion…even when I can’t feel or see that version of myself. I trusted her before I remembered the woman inside there…in my bones. We went to Oaxaca together, led Andrea and Baby D of the Wahe Crew in the mountains, through the markets, and in the studio. I crawled into that cave and let it burn everything off.

What came out was more elemental…more raw than answers or clarity…my own body…finally quiet…finally breathing…finally mine.

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That was a few years ago. Life has taken so many directions since…and somehow I find myself wading through a version of it again.

The “but” I said to Ruth Reichl a few weeks ago…how my chest tightens when conversations get hard…how my throat goes dry before I can even find the words I need. My therapist keeps asking me where I feel these feelings in my body, and the truth is: everywhere…all the time…like I’m holding on to something too tightly…and for too long…and somehow I’ve already forgotten what it feels like to just breathe normally.

I know this place…I’ve been here before.

My friend KG was in town from Hong Kong this weekend…she’s known me for something like 15+ years now. She follows and reads my Substack, she comes back home to visit a couple of times a year, and she has watched me move through a LOT…life transitions, multiple versions of myself. She listened to me describe all of it…the “but,” the uncertainty, the old patterns that show up in the body before they show up in words…and she said something I wasn’t quite ready for.

She said: in all the years she’s known me, she never knew fear to actually hold me back. She said that I leaned into those changes, into any shifts, into the things that were different or scary or unknown. She said it was one of my greatest strengths…this willingness to keep moving, to say yes before I know what I’m saying yes to, to walk into a room and figure out where I belong from there.

She said it, and I tried to find myself in it…to recognize the woman she was describing. I don’t see that same woman right now, in this season of apologizing and bracing…as I walk through life, still scanning faces for something I should already know.

And yet…there on my couch, talking with my friend, I remembered Oaxaca. I remembered the cave and remembered the smell of the heavy steam and smoke. I realized…sitting there…that I didn’t go into that cave when things were good…I went because I was broken and I was lost. I went into that cave because I didn’t know what kind of chef I was anymore or even what kind of woman, for that matter…I had left one life without knowing if the next one was actually there, waiting for me.

Maybe that’s it…maybe we aren’t meant to go into the cave after we’ve got it all figured out. Maybe we crawl into the cave just as we are…because the truth is…sometimes the body gets there first, and the mind just has to follow.

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Once again, I need to crawl into the cave…only this time, it’ll be a flowing freshwater stream in the Catskills…where I need to sit and soak and let the waters pull away all that I no longer need. The mountains are calling, and my girl Lauren and I are showing up, and we are inviting others to join…just like we did in Oaxaca.

September 10-13th…the same Wahe Crew to lead us…but this time in Andes, New York. A special mountain town, where Yas and I got married just last fall…where my friend Nicole pours her heart out at Café Mutsi on Main Street…where the mountains hold a quiet that the city forgets is possible. The Virgo new moon, the fall equinox, right around my birthday. Four days of yoga and fire ceremony and sound bath and shared meals. I’ll be in the kitchen, cooking what the land puts up in September, feeding people the way I know how.

We didn’t plan it as an echo of Oaxaca, but we just knew it was time.

I’ll be cooking there, setting the table for women who are maybe in the same place I was in that cave…the same place I am now…burning and pouring sweat and wondering if the air will come back. And it will…it always does.

But first…you have to be willing to crawl in.

My friend KG’s words she shared, stirred my soul. I believe her…and in that version of me she sees, even if I can’t feel it or see her from here. The woman who went to Oaxaca, the one who was broken open and came back new…that’s the same woman who wrote her first poem in the middle of the hardest week and let her hands do it before her brain could stop her. It’s the same woman who said yes to hosting a retreat without waiting to feel ready…she’s the same woman who can’t see herself right now because she’s still in the cave.

The cool air is coming, and I’m already crawling toward it.

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From Before
(another one, from this woman jumping into poetry for the first time…prompted by the lovely 𝚂𝚊𝚕𝚝𝚠𝚊𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚂𝚊𝚐𝚎's prompt “depths beneath my silence”)

on the outside
in my words
my actions
my face
I am a woman who moves
who does
who can

beneath her
something else
holds the throat
tightens the chest
white-knuckled
reaching deep
and wide

it keeps her hidden
and small
and quiet
a cold silence
cooling from the depths

until
the little one
there in the corner
bare feet on wet stone
fans the embers
the ones that sparked
from before

the flames grow
warming from beneath
pulling the silence
to the surface
looking for a place
to seep out
making way

a prescribed burn

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