Some stories are so big, we have to taste them to really understand.
If we could serve you a meal, you would understand Aliveness Kitchen directly through your body. Which is why we’re kitchening: some stories are so big, mere words are not enough. And, in the tasting, we — quite literally — become someone new.
It’s common for people to leave an Aliveness Kitchen meal having welcomed over 100 other bodies in to become their own.
Aliveness Kitchening seeks to create nourishment through webs of deep relationship with human and more-than-human beings. This is the seed crystal for a Kinship )food system(.
Wait…
)food system(
?
What the heck does that mean? You put your parentheses in the wrong order!
That’s not a parenthesis, that’s a narrenthesis. Where a parenthesis encloses, a narrenthesis expands, indicating a concept that is ripe for reimagining. (The root is the same as for the word “narrative.” Where are you longing for a new story?)
So when you read
)food system(
it’s an invitation to ask yourself: what are we longing for that does not yet exist, does not yet have a word to explain it? What could exist in place of our current food system that could be more nourishing, more transformative, more alive?
When it comes to Aliveness Kitchening, the unknown is a feature, not a bug.
In the Aliveness Kitchen, we practice curiosity, expanded sensing, the following of our own aliveness, and collective emergence.
Simultaneously, we are conducting agile-relational bioregional culinary research: How might we be nourished in this place if we embrace unpredictable change, creating spaciousness for the beings around us to adapt and evolve for their well-being?
As we Kitchen actively, we track and articulate the pattern languages being revealed while inviting human and more-than-human Kin to be in relationship with us/this Kitchen/this Kitchening.
Welcoming the Unknowns
Thinking beyond the Knowns to the Unknowns — and developing the skills and the attitudes necessary to move relationally toward uncertainty and change — requires supportive attention for nervous system (co)regulation and for somatic, emotional, energetic well-being. This, too, is the work of the Aliveness Kitchen.