‘Honda-san… turns to nature to open her heart. She says that it is the place where she feels most accepted. “At my sister’s I am not at complete peace, because I am thinking of ki o tsukau. (There is no English equivalent due to different assumptions of self and human relations. In broad terms, it means using vital energy to try to be sensitive to others.) Nature is the place I feel most at peace. I rode a bus and went to the sea. An egret came and played in front of me. I thanked it. I spent two hours there, embraced by nature. Here I am a human, so small in the universe.”‘ (Bringing Zen Home)

‘The kitchen, perhaps more than any other room in the home, offers us many opportunities to discover intimacy. First, we experience intimacy with the tangible world through working with our bodies, our ingredients, and the physical space of our kitchen. Second, we explore intimacy as a state of mind and discover the degree to which we allow, or don’t allow, the world and all its pleasures and pains to come in. And finally, there is the intimacy that we experience with others when we feed and nourish our friends and family and maybe even the occasional stranger.
This intimacy in all its manifestations is serious business, for to be intimate is to allow something (or everything!) to make contact with us, to touch and therefore change us, often in ways we cannot predict or understand or control. Of course, we need to have some protections, for to run out into the world with no filter, with no shield against harm or difficulty, is a form of madness. But our protections can also be habitual and occasionally even neurotic. They may have been helpful at one point in our lives but maybe not so much in our current circumstances. Often, we’ve integrated that protective shield so well, so thoroughly, that we cannot undo it even when it’s okay, even when it’s perhaps better for us not to be so defended.’ (Finding Yourself in the Kitchen)