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Changes
January 2005
A new year—a
natural time for reflection, is it not? Where were you this time
last year? How much has changed since then? How much did you want
to change but hasn’t? How many of us are truly living life on our
terms--of our choice, with no regrets? The question we really want
to ask is, “ Are we living a meaningful life?”
There are no easy
answers to this question. Nor can anyone answer
them but you. What I do know for sure is that simply seeking
to live one is the way to get there. My goodness! We all know too
well that millions of lives can change in an instant! Can we afford
to wait until next month, next year, or even tomorrow to begin to
make the changes our lives need? How many opportunities can we
afford to miss? What does it take to live an authentic life?
Always more questions—yet somehow they’re always answered—usually
however, not as expected.
As I reflect on
the past year or so, I know from experience that often what appears
to be one thing is really something else and not as it
seems---That’s why “Alice in Wonderland” was brilliant. Often what
at first appears to be tragic opens the door for new blessings.
Many of you may know that my home was destroyed in a fire on
November 3rd. What many of you may not know is that
within the last year or so, 3 other life altering events also
occurred. On June 23rd, my mother passed away. On
December 31st, 2003, I closed the door—for the last
time—to the restaurant I owned and operated with my husband (and a
great staff) for 10 years. A few months earlier, my husband, after
a divorce the previous year, moved out of our home and went back to
his home in California.
Yet here it is,
the first days of the New Year and mostly—not always—what I feel is
intense gratitude and awe. Still, I must say, it’s been a very, very
long year! No, I’m not a super woman. I do have my share of
grouchy, frustrated, moods like everyone else—had one today while
trying to return something at the mall. Can you imagine! What I do
have though is different eyes—new perspective if you will. I
suppose I’ve had this new perspective for a while, but the events of
the past year made crystal clear to me the involvement of the hand
of God in my personal affairs. The details were always perfectly
woven together. No mere human—at least as we find ourselves
now—could possibly orchestrate the sequence of events and people to
play out what needed to happen, to result in what actually
occurred. Is this too vague? Let me give a few brief examples.
My mother had a
wonderful visit with each of her children—and there are 5 of
us—right up until a few hours before she died of an unexpected heart
attack.
No one was hurt
in the fire. A few hours later I would have been sleeping in my
third floor bedroom under the worst part of the burning roof.
Instead I’m renting a comfortable house and will soon be building
the home of my dreams.
My first book
arrived in book stores the same month I closed my restaurant and
opened a whole new forum for cooking, teaching, writing—everything I
love to do and want to share with others.
Though my husband
and I divorced, we continued to live together another year while we
got ready to live out the last year of Biscotti’s lease. During
this time we recognized the soul mates we actually were for each
other and now we continue to be friends, and indeed family.
Each of these
events are filled with occurrences still more intricate and symbolic
than I can possibly reveal here, but even so, is there any mistaking
these miracles? In the process, I’ve come to believe, profoundly,
that there is indeed a Divine order to everything. I’ve
experienced--as we all have--first hand, over and over again, how
God does work in mysterious ways. In the final analysis it all
boils down to trust, recognizing that simple knowing in your body,
hearing the whispers in your mind and trusting and having the
courage to act on those feelings. Of course it doesn’t hurt to
throw in a dash of hope now and then. Right now the world could use
a truckload of it.
How can we
continue to believe in a Divine order to everything when everything
around us is in perfect chaos? One of the things I learned running
a restaurant, is that it ran best as organized chaos. In fact it
wasn’t chaos at all—it just looked that way. Somehow everything
that needed to get done did, and everyone was happy—at least most of
the time. Somehow we just have to
trust that God, the Universe, Spirit, Source, The Force, whatever
you want to call it—Knows what they’re doing. We just have to
figure out what our part is. And you know what? That takes brutal
honesty. And it’s not easy until you get the hang of it. Yes, our
faith is being sorely tested right now, in every one of us. It
seems to be a world gone mad and the death toll keeps getting
higher. Where do we go from here?
I started out
this ‘Note’ by asking how we’ve, changed in the past year because I
believe change is our way out. 9/11 didn’t just happen because of
a bunch of terrorists. If this were the case,
the lives and deaths of all those souls
would be meaningless. Was it simply thousands of people in
the wrong place at the wrong time? And who then do we blame the
tsunami tragedy on? Is it the wrath of Mother Nature or a more
massive number of people in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Certainly Mother Nature has plenty to be angry at us about—but
thousands of souls passing on, together a mere accident? I don’t
think so. No, I don’t believe in accidents, only in their
messages. We must know we’ve just received a global wake-up-call of
biblical proportions! This obviously isn’t the problem of a single
country. We’re all in this together. What I know about
wake-up-calls though, is that they keep upping the ante if we don’t
listen. Wake-up-calls demand changes. I believe most of us, if
we’re honest with ourselves, know this. We just don’t want to change
until we're on our knees. Well we’d all better get on our knees then.
We simply can’t continue to respond to things the way we always have
and expect different results. We know this to be true
in our personal lives and it’s just
as true in our collective lives. It takes faith to face life
without fear. It requires reflection to ask the questions that really matter to us. It
takes willingness to accept the answers that are given, and courage
to do something about them. Yet each and every one of us are in
fact, intuitive, Divine, beings.
Let’s start acting like ones! We’ve heard it said that in order to
change the world we must first change and heal ourselves. Let’s get
started. There’s not a moment to waste. Maybe then, our collective
dreams will be ones in which we can begin to create a heaven on
earth because we’ve become the kind
of human beings who feel comfortable there.
And you thought I
was going to write about food. I am—just another type of
nourishment.
I wish you all
many wonderful changes.
Chef Silvia
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