The Length of Love
Plus, My Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe
An image of one of me on my favorite beach in 2023. © Joy LeDuc 2023
It’s been a deep and considered month since my last share. I missed you.
And also, I treasured the time to go within, see family, recover from an illness, notice the seasons shift, cook, eat, clean, be still, shift almost every aspect of my daily life, and allow my emergence to continue to unfold.
That’s what happens. A soul’s emergence continues. It is ever unfolding. You will never be done becoming more you. However, the more you love yourself enough to choose your own emergence, with greater attunement, you may notice the turning of the pages of your evolution.
And I’m entering 2024 noticing a lot.
I have noticed that the more I go within and get quiet, the more rapidly the magic of my life unfolds. I release an old story and I feel instantly spacious within. I say “no” to this and then, I’m offered that which is a “hell yes.” I feel emotions and move them through and out of the body far quicker than any other time in my life.
I am in constant dialogue with my higher intelligence, my soul, who exists so far away from traditional time that I am more rapidly calling in what is for me, for now.
And, in turn, I’m letting go of what is not for me.
“I was slowly learning that love did not mean holding on, which I had always thought, but rather letting go.” –a quote by Ken Wilber
Before the dip into December, before the last elder of my family—my dearest uncle—transitioned, I had a prescient dream.
In the dream, my grandmother presented herself. She didn’t look like my grandmother, not the one who made dandelion tea from weeds in the backyard.
Not the one who sewed dresses for me from scraps of sturdy, scratchy fabric.
Not the one with whom I could only communicate with smiles and gestures and hugs, given I didn’t learn Spanish until well after she could no longer visit from Honduras.
She didn’t have to look like my grandmother for me to know it was Zoila. She identified herself by her age. She said, “I’d be around age 105 or 110 today.”
I quickly texted this message about his mother to my uncle. He confirmed, “She would be 108 years old. Take care.”
In the dream, mi abuelita resembled a skeleton, a decaying corpse, death. I wasn’t scared, I was just present. And without words, she conveyed that she was waiting for her son and he would be with her soon.
And then, she handed me a shiny red apple.
A few weeks after the text messages between us, my uncle was gone.
With his passing, I was just present and grateful, grateful for the ancestral connections that persist the more you convene with your soul.
I rolled around with the potential meaning of this shiny red apple of a gift. And when nothing that soothed my soul surfaced, I tucked it into a proverbial back pocket for some bit of future inquiry.
Not coincidentally, the last month of stillness has been filled with constant moments of becoming, of loving myself enough now, in the present, after all these years.
During this down time, I did things for me. I allowed me to be all of me. I did new things and old things to see which felt most like me.
For example, I drove twelve hours over two days to spend some holiday time with the next generation of my family. Sure, their parents are swell but I did all that driving to notice the evolution of the future ancestors.
I learned that all that driving was worth it. I got to deepen connections that I hope persist long after my own passing.
Also, I hulled two cups of near expired salted pistachios from their shell, soaking them in water overnight to remove the salt and soften them. I made pistachio milk expressly to make pudding. I served the pistachio and vanilla pudding to myself with a spoonful of homemade jam made with frozen strawberries and coconut sugar.
I learned that I still loved pudding. I learned that I only like jam made with coconut sugar.
I also defrosted and soaked Oregon hazelnuts, turning them into hazelnut milk with just water, a couple dates, and a pinch of sea salt. I like hazelnut milk in my chocolate smoothies and it foams up well in the lattes I make on unhurried mornings.
For creamier nut milks, I learned that I prefer about one and a half cups of nuts to three cups of water.
I made mashed white potatoes and they were fine. But I also made mashed sweet potatoes and they were fantastic.
I learned that I like to add butter and cinnamon to the mash, and sometimes I’ll toss in a rogue butternut squash, to feel extra resourceful, like I’ve made good use of all those lonely, near-expired vegetables in the back of the fridge.
I’m not quite done with my love for cottage cheese. I ate it on toast and crackers and scrambled eggs. I also spooned it on top of chili and pasta, and I swirled it into a thick soup.
I learned that I like a little tang on top of anything a bit hearty. Though not as spritely as lemon juice, a dollop of cottage cheese cuts through the heaviness well.
Maybe a bit like love cuts through or helps us hold loss.
I finally made my first pot of beef and bean chili in my cozy home by the sea. Chili is a lot more fun with a crowd, of course, but you know what else is fun? Freezing eight one-cup containers of chili for some future stretch of stillness.
My chili is filled with one pound of grass-fed ground beef, one pound of cooked kidney beans, and one pound of chopped sweet peppers, onions, butternut squash, and sweet potatoes.
I learned that I love chili reheated with shredded cabbage or spinach. I like mixing greens with robust dishes, that’s what I’ve learned about me.
I also made my first loaf of No Knead Bread (without the cranberries and the nuts). Some of you know that I used to bake bread from scratch regularly. I haven’t returned to the practice for various reasons but the stillness provided a kind of coziness for this lengthier exercise.
I learned that No Knead Bread is delicious just out of the oven but softens soon after. I prefer sourdough bread and, come summer, I’ll rehydrate my sourdough starter from the before times, when it was ripe with the bacteria from my last kitchen, the one in which I wrote two cookbooks.
Sourdough has a soul and it creates a lineage. It births loaf upon loaf from a starter that evolves with proper earth, air, and water. I provide the element of fire with a short time spent in a rousingly hot oven.
During my downtime, there were lessons and there were losses. Some of the losses are less tangible, hard to describe. I’ll try to describe one of them.
In a random slow yoga class, I met an elderly woman, around seventy years old, who instantly felt familiar.
She began with small talk but quickly dove deep into her fifty years of work for and with the spiritual teacher Baba Ram Dass.
She described driving away from all she knew in her old port town to begin training with him in New York City at the age of twenty two. She recounted story after story about him in a highly energetic fashion, perhaps excited that someone wanted to know more.
We made a date for tea at her home but before she left class, she placed her hands on my shoulders to bring weight to her words, saying, “You know, the reason I went so deep so fast with you is, well, I could see the love in your eyes.”
I silently placed my hand on my heart, as a thank you.
A few weeks later, I visited her for that tea. It was a strangely familiar drive ascending a narrow, winding road just up from the sea, the smell of salt ripe in the air. I pulled into her driveway and thought to myself, “I know this house. I’ve been here before.”
And, the moment I walked into the kitchen, I knew. This was the last house my ex-husband and I viewed when we were in the “figuring out our next steps” phase of the marriage.
Perhaps one or both of us hoped that a new house by the sea was exactly what we needed to fuse our separating paths. I think we both liked the house. It ticked all of our boxes. But we couldn’t or wouldn’t take the next step.
Sitting by the fireplace in the kitchen I had hoped to own just a few years prior, I had tea for two hours with this sweet woman, flipping through photos of her time with “Ram,” as she called him.
Why would the universe or magic or my ancestors or the sweetness of my life bring me back to this home? I may not know the final meaning of this reunion for a long time.
But my sweet soul says we have to say goodbye to deep love, recognize the loss of love, many, many times in order for us to integrate all the love and make space for more love. Not just romantic love but for the love of self, from the soul.
During my downtime, I also heard something quite specific.
I heard the soul say that doing all the new things is, of course, about feeling alive again, and, of course, about fostering the emergence of my soul.
I also heard the soul say that being with the stillness is, of course, about more finely attuning to the frequencies of my ancestors, lineage, soul connections, collective healing, and the planet.
But more than all that, it’s about learning just how much I finally love myself, like really love myself. It’s about being present with myself and the world because it’s in the presence that I see and feel the love, from every angle, from every dimension.
“Presence is the birthplace of the future and the arrival of the past.”—a quote from Thomas Hübl
In continued silence and deep presence in this new year, I recently had a conversation with a very magical friend.
We were speaking about soul and spirit guides and ancestors—you know, all the good things—and I relayed the story of my grandmother’s visit in my dreams.
I said, “What comes to mind when you think about the gift of the apple?”
She offered, “Well, what do you give to teachers? She was giving the teacher a gift.”
I sat back in my chair. I remembered that all the elders in my lineage are now part of the unseen world. I realized that I was now one of the elders.
And, in 2024, I’m hearing the call to step into the role of teacher.
Before you go and because it’s a wee bit more fun to bake new things together, I’m including my recipe for my favorite Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies down below for everyone.
I’d be honored if we all baked them together this month. Energetically, it would feel quite good, I suspect, to soothe our souls with cookies.
This recipe is from my second cookbook, A New Way to Food, published by Roost Books in 2019. I’ve simplified the directions considerably. If you use semi-sweet chocolate chips, they are not entirely vegan. But you do what feels good to you. Because this life is very short and your love for yourself is, let’s hope, very, very long.
If you make the recipe, come back here to leave a comment on the story and share your impressions of it and the cookies. I would love to hear from your sweet soul.
Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies
Makes about 20 cookies
Ingredients:
2 cups (240 g) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon fine sea salt
1 cup (160 g) semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup maple sugar or cane sugar
1/2 cup coconut sugar or light brown sugar
1/2 cup plus 1 tablespoon organic canola or safflower oil
1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon water
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
Flaky sea salt (like Maldon), for garnish
Directions:
Whisk together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and chocolate chips.
Whisk the sugars, oil, water, and vanilla extract in a separate bowl until smooth, about 2 whole minutes.
Fold the dry mixture into the wet mixture until just combined. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate the dough for 6 hours or overnight.
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees while softening the dough to room temperature for 10 minutes. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Scoop 1 tablespoon mounds onto the parchment, 2 inches apart. Sprinkle each with flaky sea salt. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes, until the edges are golden, turning the pan halfway through.
Cool the cookies for 5 minutes and move to a wire rack or parchment to cool completely before serving.
