Cooking, for me, has always been a sensual experience. I look, smell, taste, touch. For many of us, coming to our senses is pretty much incomprehensible. Again and again, I encounter people wanting to get it right and make the food according to the recipe rather than learning to trust their instincts and their capacity to negotiate the way for themselves. “How much salt did you put in?” they ask me, without realizing that they do not know how much asparagus or tomato sauce I am putting the salt on.

Ironically, I began cooking from a friend’s copy of a Zen macrobiotic cookbook by George Ohsawa. Since macrobiotics has little or nothing to do with Zen, the designation is just one of those marketing ploys designed to sell: Get this book because it’s Zen! But, though the recipes were not particularly special, it was a place to start, and most of what I was doing wasn’t in the cookbook anyway: cutting the celery stalks into commas, boomerangs, and lengthy diagonal strips; marveling at the intricate cross section of cabbage, so reminiscent of trees; and playing with colors. With a stack of small wooden bowls as well as a set of enamel-coated thrift-store aluminum bowls, I would try placing the carrot pieces in the wooden bowl, the magenta bowl, the emerald bowl, the silver bowl—only to shift them around later, when the ingredients accumulated. No one else would see this magnificent display of colors arrayed before cooking. But I was finding connection with the world through food.

Almost immediately, I discovered that I could cook vegetables that were delicious—that is, leaving the broccoli, the asparagus, the cabbage slightly crunchy, rather than cooking them to death. Years later, when I assisted Deborah Madison in writing The Greens Cookbook, we advised readers to “cook the vegetables until they are as tender as you like.” Still, our copyeditor asked, “How long? How do we know?” You trust your taste—until it changes, and then you trust your taste again. You’re the cook!

Cooking wasn’t just about getting something done or getting something right. I was absorbed in a world of beauty, fragrance, delight. 

And I wasn’t alone any longer. I had all these colorful, flavorful companions right before my eyes, speaking to me from far away. I’m remembering the white onions, orange carrots, pale-green celery, and deep-green bell peppers. For dinner parties, I would buy a large bottle of sake (1.5 liters, which was $3 in those days) and busy myself serving food and refilling the little sake cups. I didn’t need to be brilliantly social, after all. I could set up a table and chairs, offer sustenance, provide a companionable space. Smiles, bright eyes, and flowing conversation brought life and conviviality to my kitchen.

Looking back, I was beginning a lifelong love affair. Over many years, I found that if I could relate to food with warmhearted compassion, eventually I could learn to treat people with love and respect, and I could touch my own wounds with tenderness. Marriage, divorce, the passing of my Zen teachers—through it all, food and cooking have sustained me.