Written by Dean Musgrove 

Nearing retirement, I became more and more aware of an impending hell realm approaching- the special hell reserved for widowed old men, consigned to their Barcalounger recliners, screaming at the six o’clock news. To avoid that fate, I made a to-do list: renew passport, join a gym, get some service commitments, and never set an alarm clock again. But foremost was the intention to live out my golden years fully involved with Stone Creek and practice, so when Jisho and Meg asked me to be Tenzo, I said yes without thinking and abandoned the vow to never set an alarm clock.

Food has been a karmic throughline in my life. As I child, in bewildering circumstances, I turned to food for comfort and solace. My first job was delivering pies in a 1962 Rambler station wagon, “Pizza Man, He Delivers!” I was a teenage line cook at the Cattleman’s on the Redondo Beach pier the first time I was fired. Early career was owning and operating a couple of highly unsuccessful restaurants, each in possession of a liquor license. If only, I would have realized then that the license was to sell liquor, not a license to abuse it at will. The suffering that arose out of living by that confusion led me to spiritual practice. My first and probably deepest meditative insight was, “Dude, you think about food a lot!”…

Sunday dinners at my Sicilian grandmother’s, with platters of pasta, lasagna, braciole, noisy with aunts and uncles yelling at each other from across the table in second generation Italian are happy memories. Helping my wife, Susan, pull together her famous St. Patrick’s Day corned beef and cabbage dinners for family are some of the best times we shared. From these meals, I learned that food is love.

To cook for sesshins and practice days at Stone Creek is a joy. It is a practice that summons up my whole self. To fulfill the Tenzo’s role I must use heart and body. All of the senses, sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing and mind, instincts, experience, perception, judgement, discernment, and even neuroses come into play. It uses some of my best parts and forces me to face the worst. To gather energy and use its life force for the benefit of our practice feels like a culmination and a “just right” way to live out this next golden chapter.

The meal chant asks us to consider the giver, receiver and gift. Our oryoki meals make me question just who is the giver and who is the receiver, when the gift of gratitude and reverence for our miraculous shared life bursts forth in the dining room.

That food is love was always apparent to me. It took marriage to Susan to finally learn a more elusive lesson- love is food. Being nourished by love is a gentle current running through Stone Creek.

Thanks to Jisho and Meg for giving me the opportunity to cook my practice. Thanks to sangha for entrusting your stomachs to my hands. Thanks to my mentors, Toan, Annette, and especially the generous tutelage from Peggy.