shameless, delicious, wild, mostly not found working hard.
God, I love being a woman.
Somewhere, from the beginning of my twenties to the end, my “work ethic” and my ability to “work haaaaard” was decentered as the sun of my personality. It is no longer the tallest flower in the garden of my identity, it is not the central installation in the gallery that is me. This shift has occurred entirely by my own diabolical doing, of course. My own delicious loosening, resting, waxing and waning. Softening, dancing, slithering and taking breaths that reach my pelvic floor.
Only
could’ve made that perfectly succinct, iconic, erotic.Nowadays, when friends and lovers and family speak of me, they tend to speak of my heart first. Of what makes me the woman that I be. My wisdom, my love, my softness, my energy, my nurturing, the way it feels to be in relationship with me. “I love her because she works soooo hard” has ceased to be the first thing that comes to someone’s mind when they explain why they love me. Was it ever, though? I can’t remember the last time someone I loved being loved by ever said that.
You’ll never catch me with a man saying he loves me for my work ethic and my ambition. Who I am Being, not what I be Doing, has taken its place. I am so much more than working, and I see that. When my self-gaze shifted, my world’s did too.
When I stopped making my ability to repeatedly crucify myself at the altar of productivity the Thing that defines me most dominantly, it ceased to be that thing.
“Applaud me for how ardently I suffer, reward me for the meals I skip, revere me for my cortisol marinated glory,” a performance where nobody won and I ended up with an IV hooked to my veins.
The more times I have shedded the ‘Good Girl,’ the project to contort a 28 day cyclical being into a 24h cyclical little man who has breasts and hips and bleeds, the more gracefully I slithered into a new timeline. And thank god for that. I fiercely pride myself for this development, and I dare say I take even more pride in it than I do in all the meritocratic achievements I may have accumulated.
I am a woman, a relational being, and the way that I create nourishment, harmony, beauty and energetic dance in relationships, the way I make people feel, the way that I pour into life and lives, that is my life’s art, my life’s work. It is something that is in no way less important than my capitalistic pursuits. There are no certificates for what we do. Too much of it is invisible. None of the magic in this world would exist without it. It appears I am being loved and remembered for my being even more than my doing. God, I love being a woman.
An excerpt below, one that you’ll find earnestly highlighted and annotated with a leaky black fountain pen in my copy of Women Who Run With The Wolves by Dr Clarissa Pinkola Estés. It brings up for me how women, even wild women, especially wild women, are relational beings. It is in our relating that we find the most beautiful work, wisdom, witchcraft and alchemy of our lives.
It is into this fundamental, elemental and essential relationship that we were born and that in our essence we are also derived from. The Wild Woman archetype sheaths the alpha matrilineal being. There are times when we experience her, even if only fleetingly, and it makes us mad with wanting to continue. For some women, this vitalizing “taste of the wild” comes during pregnancy, during nursing their young, during the miracle of change in oneself as one raises a child, during attending to a love relationship as one would tend to a beloved garden. These transient "tastes of the wild" come during the mystique of inspiration -ah, there it is; oh, now it has gone. The longing for her comes when one happens across someone who has secured this wildish relationship. The longing comes when one realizes one has given scant time to the mystic cookfire or to the dream-time, too little time to one's own creative life, one's life work, or one's true loves.
These transient "tastes of the wild" come during the mystique of inspiration -ah, there it is; oh, now it has gone. The longing for her comes when one happens across someone who has secured this wildish relationship. The longing comes when one realizes one has given scant time to the mystic cookfire or to the dream-time, too little time to one's own creative life, one's life work, or one's true loves.
Yet it is these fleeting tastes which come both through beauty as well as loss, that cause us to become so bereft, so agitated, so longing that we eventually must pursue the wildish nature. Then we leap into the forest or into the desert or into the snow and run hard, our eyes, scanning the ground, our hearing sharply tuned, searching under, searching over, searching for a clue, a remnant, a sign that she still lives, that we have not lost our chance. And when we pick up her trail, it is typical of women to ride hard to catch up, to clear off the desk, clear off the relationship, clear out one's mind, turn to a new page, insist on a break, break the rules, stop the world, for we are not going on without her any longer.
Once women have lost her and then found her again, they will contend to keep her for good. Once they have regained her, they will fight and fight hard to keep her, for with her their creative lives blossom; their relationships gain meaning and depth and health; their cycles of sexuality, creativity, work, and play are re-established; they are no longer marks for the predations of others; they are entitled equally under the laws of nature to grow and to thrive. Now their end-of-the-day fatigue comes from satisfying work and endeavors, not from being shut up in too small a mind-set, job, or relationship. They know instinctively when things must die and when things must live; they know how to walk away, they know how to stay.
I pray for a life of working hard, soft, gentle, obsessive, rhythmic, seasonal, sensual, wholesome, grounded, romantically, beautifully, intensely, erotically and passionately, on the right things that actually light us up and are worth it. For myself, and for every other woman who desires so.
May work and creation nourish and satisfy us deeply the way bone broth, butter and actual meat do. May performative, empty business evade us, may work that acts like over the counter supplements providing a more ‘optimized’ way to avoid eating an actual fruit never hold power over us.
Something I’ve been thinking about, as I see more and more ‘kitchari’ (lol) on this feed, is all the ways in which an ayurvedic consciousness is inherently, intricately and all too intimately woven into our daily lives in India. We take it for granted.
As an Indian woman witnessing the surge in global enchantment with ayurveda, I wonder if you’ve ever noticed in the way that I have how almost everything beautiful ever prescribed by ayurveda is based upon an unspoken foundational assumption that there is a woman whose primary role is nurturing, nourishing and priestessing over the kitchen.
I don’t say that as a Bad Thing or some kind of angry feminist hot take. I love being a woman in the kitchen. I deeply fucking admire, revere and glorify women in the kitchen, who are there by their own free will. To make it luxurious beyond mere free will, I love women in the kitchen being there from heart-led desire. I love giving hours of my day to managing my family’s food, and I am privileged that I get to give it. I am protected and provided for enough for me to be able to do this, as any woman who loves to nurture needs to be.
I feel like it couldn’t be noticed enough. Women’s work and women’s ability to BE in the kitchen is a serious contribution to the quality of life, legacy, health and culinary heritage of entire lineages. Women are usually the beings who bring into everyday execution everything that ayurveda instructs us one must do to live a healthy life. Who is ensuring that every meal is freshly prepared and served warm off the fire, and that the concept of freezing food is nearly irrelevant in India? Sometimes, it’s unnerving how spoiled we are by women in the kitchen that we make their presence and their gifts invisible.
Ayurvedic ideas of what a good diet is, ayurvedic prescriptions of food as medicine and ayurvedic templates for everyday well-being have always rested upon the domestic presence, magic and labour of daughters, wives, mothers, women in the kitchen. Women who take on the role of the nurturers, the keepers of ancestral wisdom and the nourishment medicine witches for their families and their homes.
I was recently published in an anthology called ‘Memories on a Plate: Stories from 100 Indian Kitchens,’ a beautiful collaborative project of The Alipore Post and Nivaala. I share my amuma’s spicy chutney recipe, and an even spicier piece on the metamorphosis of women in the kitchen through generations of cooking in our family. This book is a beautiful, cozy and sacral-kissing collection of recipes, stories, art and poetry from Indian kitchens.
~ This is something beautiful to read, to re-enchant your life, and recalibrate your ideas around what the phrase ‘woman in the kitchen’ brings up for you.
~ Something I read recently on beauty
~ A book that I think every woman should read. A lifesaver. A trigger. Everything.
~ A space that contributed hugely to my unbecoming and rebirthing into the juiciest, most poetic version of life I’ve lived so far.
~ On being asked annoying, arousing, activating, amazing questions like “How do you have the time to rest?” and “What do you do?”
~ My shop, for readers and patrons in India, where you’re welcome to browse handcrafted Indian textile sarees that I create and curate, and find a select few of my handcrafted ceramic works that are available to purchase.