Chicken Soup Exists!

awe, terror & hypnosis

photo by Mia McDonald (my talented mom who responded to my request for pictures of carrots without batting an eye—and with many pictures of carrots <3)

I’ve been noticing a lot of chatter about awe recently. The experience of being awed, chasing awe, unlocking awe, so awe-n and so forth (ha ha). It’s probably one of those things—like when you’re thinking about buying a car and you start seeing that one make and model everywhere. Is there a word for that?

I aim to live a life full of awe—an awesome life—in the traditional, maybe even in the truly archaic sense of the word. The sense that links wonder to terror, reverence to dread. This aim leads me to notice the places where awe appears.

I stumbled upon an article about how to rediscover childlike wonder that identified “awe” as the source of that wonder. Then I began reading Zero at the Bone and awe was all over it.¹ My beloved Red Hand Files is always filled with the stuff, and there it was in “The Teapot” by Robert Bly. Like the car, it’s everywhere—in snow covered trash bags, in the sunset at 5:28, in a big pot of chicken soup. 

I made one the other day—a big pot of chicken soup—homemade & without a recipe. I just chopped up an onion, some celery, some carrots. I grated some garlic because I like garlic. Fresh thyme, some red pepper flakes. Salt & a little black pepper. Sautéed all that to soften it up. Poured in some stock and added some water and two raw chicken breasts and a cup of uncooked rice. Brought it to a boil, then partially covered the pot, lowered the heat, and let it simmer for 20 minutes. 

I burned my mouth four times trying to eat it once it was ready, and I moaned with pleasure anyway. Thank you soup for the burnt tongue. Thank you pot for getting so hot. Thank you vegetables for growing. Thank you chicken for dying for me. Thank you rice for existing. Thank you God for making it possible that these simple things taste like this when you put them together. Surely some higher power is at play. 

I know that when it comes to food I can verge into the seemingly hyperbolic, but the above is the simplest way I can think of to tell you how it feels inside of me to eat homemade chicken soup fresh out of the pot, hot off the stove. And perhaps I can be forgiven for the hysterics because this was only the second time I’ve ever eaten homemade chicken soup fresh out of the pot, hot off the stove.²

HOW is this possible, you ask? Well, I only recently started eating chicken soup at all. Less than a year ago! WHY, you ask? Well, because I didn’t like vegetables, almost not even a single one, up to and including the celery, and the carrots, and frankly the onions, as ridiculous as that is, inside of chicken soup.³ I know what you’re thinking now, because I lived roughly 20 years answering the question that comes next—“Not even [insert the vegetable that you think is the least vegetable-y vegetable here]?!?!!” 

No, not even that one. Unless the one you thought of was arugula and/or fennel (the two vegetables I really did like), which would be bizarre because according to all sources, they are very vegetable-y vegetables indeed. I still don’t have a gauge for these kinds of things personally. 

So, what happened? Clearly I eat the celery and the carrots and the onions in the soup now if I’m hollering in ecstasy and weeping tears of joy over the pot on my stove as I so claim. Prepare for another outlandish claim: I got hypnotized. Once. And that was all it took. 

This time last year, I was introduced to a man named Adam who was in the process of getting his certification for…hypnotherapy? Therapeutic hypnosis? Adam was looking for people to hypnotize so that he could become a…certified hypnotist? No idea honestly—if I bothered to ask about the terminology at the time, I’ve forgotten it now. 

On a Wednesday, Adam and I had a call where I explained my entire ~history with vegetables~. You can laugh. Having just recently started a new job, I took the call in the phone room directly adjacent to the reception desk at my office. There I was, going on about how I have no memories of the first time I decided not to eat vegetables, no traumas, was a stubborn child, have just always been this way. My happy place is the beach on a hot day at 4:15pm when everyone else has left. These are my hopes and dreams for a vegetable filled life. 45 minutes into this unburdening, one of our receptionists tapped on the door to inform me that the room is not, in fact, sound-proofed.

The next day, safe in my own apartment, I laid down on my bed, opened up my computer, and got hypnotized over Zoom. Yes, Zoom! The wonders of modern technology never do cease. First, Adam put me in a trance (lots of counting down from ten), and then he repeated things back to me that I had told him the previous day, like “there’s no logical reason why I can’t try new vegetables.” You can laugh. 

In fact, I was laughing, even in my trance. Despite the fact that only moments before, a miniature sized version of me was sitting on a leaf floating down through the inside of the normal sized version of me’s body—from my brain through my throat and ribcage down to rest in the hammock of my diaphragm—I was fully conscious, aware of everything that was happening, and I was greatly amused. It was all so preposterous. I can’t explain the tiny me inside the large me, but I suspect it might have been a manifestation of my conscious mind. If true, she’s tiny like a fairy. 

At the end, Adam counted me back up out of my trance, and that was it. I felt supremely relaxed, very well-rested, and otherwise completely the same. Then I ate eggplant and spinach and I can’t remember what else at dinner that night, and just haven’t stopped eating like a mostly normal person since. 

I’m laughing to myself as I write this because I can see my sister rolling her eyes and my lover literally running away from me at a party as I start to tell this story again. I tell it all the time, and I never leave any details out, so it always takes forever. But I can’t help it—it’s a pretty insane story. I went my whole life thinking that I didn’t like vegetables, and then I listened to a man talk for an hour and discovered that wasn’t true at all.

I did like vegetables, do like them (though not cauliflower, which I believe people only eat as an excuse to eat whatever sauce is on it). I had just spent such a lot of time reinforcing the neural pathways in my brain that said I didn’t like them—with such certainty and stubbornness, that I had turned them to stone. The pathways that is. I couldn’t imagine that these things (leafy green as they were) could possibly taste good, and so they didn’t. Neuroplasticity is a cause I care deeply about, and I do believe that hypnosis is a key if not the key, but that’s a topic for another time, and this is not propaganda for hypnosis (though if the hypnosis propagandists are looking for someone to write their copy, I AM available).

The reason I can’t stop telling this story, at least insofar as it relates to where I started off today (if you can cast your mind back that far) is because I wish that everyone could taste homemade chicken soup the way that I taste homemade chicken soup. I wish that everyone could feel the awe, my awe.  

Can everyone? Some of the chatter about awe that’s impressed itself upon me in recent weeks posits that the sensation of awe is richest in childhood. You must unlock your inner child to find the awe. And I can see where this notion comes from—children surely experience awe with greater frequency in the general sense, everything is new—but I don’t think that the kind of awe I’m interested in is something that a child can experience, at least not fully. The kind of awe that is laced with terror and dread? A child does not know it, or if they do, it impresses itself upon them and unsettles them on a subconscious level only. 

I think a conscious awareness of the terror and dread is essential and enriching. Most people each chicken soup for the first time when they are small little blobs with sticky hands and good-smelling heads. They know that it’s good and they smile and clap their hands and say “more” without being able to pronounce the R, but they do not know that it’s a miracle, because they do not know pain or fear in any real sense of the word.

I do not know pain or fear in any real sense of the word, but I will one day. And then I won’t again and then I will again. Things will get so much worse, and then so much better, and I won’t know when or how, and I certainly won’t know why. But—there is chicken soup. It’s in this world where I live. To consider how many victories of good chance are wrapped up in the very existence of my pot of chicken soup and how many tragedies—surely just as many—and to still be alive and eating it, having done that considering and lived to tell the tale. That is the awe that I’m after.

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1. Review forthcoming.

2. The first time was right before the new year when I was still recovering from a Christmas cold and decided to try making some.

3. I also didn’t like fruit, but that’s a whole other can of worms. Suffice it to say that when I discovered how much strawberries and cherries actually taste like candy, I was astounded.