what would you take?

I have sometimes been asked and sometimes asked myself the question "what would you take if you had to leave your house suddenly because of a fire?. Yes my passport, yes my laptop - things that would make it easy to start again.

But the one thing I would definitely take is my recipe book.

You see, my life is contained in the small photograph album stuffed to overflowing with paper.

My mom made me my recipe book as a leaving home present. She got one of those photo albums that hold a picture on the top page and bottom page in a clear plastic sleeve. She went through her recipe book (made for her by her mom, my nanna) and copied out some of the favorite family recipes: Nanna's peanut butter crinkle cookies, the Koyl chocolate cake (eaten at countless family gatherings and my brother's favorite birthday cake), a bread recipe I'd given her back when I was learning to bake. She filled the empty slots with more recipe cards. I quickly filled a number of those cards in an excited frenzy, delighted to be cooking for my newly launched self and the friends that came to share my table.

Years later, the book is stuffed with bits and pieces of paper holding various recipes. But the recipes are really incidental; these papers hold my memories. The recipe for corned beef hash, very carefully set out in my dad's notoriously unreadable handwriting. We have had corned beef hash, made by my dad, as Christmas breakfast for as far back as I can remember. My handwriting setting out how to make hot roast beef sandwiches, scribbled on a bit of a telephone pad as I jotted down the instructions from a long distance telelphone call made to my mom. A recipe for scones in the hand of an old boyfriend. My recipe for brownies, brought home from a year spent living in New Zealand. The recipe for Wendy Anthony's famous cookies (secret ingredient: almond essence). Arising out of a discussion about drinks held in the university student lounge, a recipe for Chai scratched on the back of a bank receipt by a friend who had recently returned from spending a year in India (she included the hindi script for chai at the top of the recipe). My best friend's recipe for carrot cake. I've never made that recipe, but it reminds me of her wedding where I was her maid of honour at an outdoor wedding in the freezing cold of early March - they had carrot cake as their wedding cake. A sheet of paper in my mom's handwriting describing how to can peaches. My sister in law's recipe for granola, given to me the summer after she married my brother and requested because of a lovely breakfast spent out on their garden deck eating granola, yoghurt and blueberries harvested from their bushes.

The recipes help me cook the food,but they are far more than mere tools. The handwriting, the memories the recipes invoke: they are the pictures of my soul.

patience

I want to beg you as much as you can, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. Perhaps you do carry within yourself the possibility of shaping and forming as a particularly happy and pure way of living; train yourself to it - but take whatever comes with great trust, and if only it comes out of your own will, out of some need of your innermost being, take it upon yourself and hate nothing.

Source: Letters to a Young Poet

Rainer Maria Rilke

quotes

To live content with small means, to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion, to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich, to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly, to listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with open heart, to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never, in a word to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common, this is to be my symphony
- William Ellery Channing


Nine requisites for contented living:
Health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength enough to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished. Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor. Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others. Faith enough to make real the things of God. Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future
- Goethe