The Fire Keepers

Our kitchens as a place of devotion.

I want to take a step back this week. I’m getting requests for more single recipes to dig into, so this week I’ll be sharing a couple during the in more depth. Let me know how you find the format; I’m always listening. I wanted to share this piece first to kick off the week.

I need to be honest with you.

I was afraid to write this article. Growing up, I would always say, “I don’t know what I believe” when it comes to God. I shared it in discourse in Hebrew School. I said it in the Catholic High School I went to. I was open, but I didn’t “know.”

At 44, a father of two with a beautiful wife, I am realizing that there has been something blocking my faith in God, and I’m getting pretty close to understand that thing.

There, even typing God, I felt a cringe of discomfort.

And that fear, that sneaky fear bleeds into these thoughts of uncertainty in life, even in this moment. What if people unsubscribe because I’m talking about God? What if people want me to stay in my lane and just share about food and cooking? What if people have judgments of me because I’m Jewish? What if, what if, what if?

I grew up in a conservative Jewish home. I went to Hebrew School through High School. I had a Bar Mitzvah. I can chant countless prayers in Hebrew, even though I don’t know what most of it means. I never progressed to learn spoken Hebrew.

I’m also half Irish. My mother converted before she had us five kids. Before meeting my Dad, my mother used to tell us that she had seriously considered joining the convent and becoming a nun.

We celebrated Christmas at Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Western Mass in a little town called Gill.

My great-grandparents left Western Ireland, landed in the town over, Turners Falls, and worked in a paper mill and lived in a small tenement building.

Our “Christmas” presents were wrapped in blue Chanukah wrapping paper. I always found it weird and uncomfortable that we had to have different paper. We were different…

I was confused as a kid. Are we both? Am I half Jewish? What does it mean to be half Irish Catholic? Let me tell you something about growing up “part Irish”…you’re Irish, and you’re proud to be Irish. But Irish Jews? How many of those are there, like nine?

When I went to a Catholic High School, I tiptoed around the awkwardness I felt. I wanted to tell people, hey, I’m Irish, I belong.

When I was with my Jewish friends, though, I always felt at ease, and I relaxed into that identity.

In high school, I wanted to join the chorus. I always loved to sing, but I didn’t. My fear? What would people think about the Jewish kid singing about Jesus?

When my Grandfather Malcolm Conway passed away, my older brother and I sang “Oh Danny Boy” with the accordion player from the balcony in the local Catholic Church. In that moment, with tears in my eyes, there was no confusion. There were no thoughts of “identity,” just love for Grandpa, and the knowing that God existed, even if I didn’t ever seem to know how to articulate that belief with grace.

So deep down, I don’t just believe; I know.

But a funny thing has crept into my subconscious over the last number of years. I have this fear of expressing and living a confident belief in God. Maybe it’s the word and the religious context.

This part of me is not at peace.

Perhaps, this is the midlife crisis…

And that’s okay. It just is. Here’s what I know, though, in my heart to be true.

Kids are full of light, which I would describe as godlike. They have a brilliance, a light that reveals a connection to the divine, which I have all too often strayed from in my adult life.

I think there is an epidemic of sorts, a distortion, in the way we are raising kids that squashes a kid’s light and tears them from their inherent divine connection.

The screens, the countless hours indoors, the endless medication, the punishments and reprimands, the plastic pouches, and sterile snacks, the outsourcing of their “education,” in artificially lit rooms and school lunches I can only describe as offensive.

I don’t write this from some higher ground. I live in this world and make all the mistakes.

What I share is because I know what held back my own light as a kid. It’s my self-work now.

The other day, someone sent me a reel that stated, “Create a life for your kids; they don’t have to heal from.”

I look at my sons in wonder at their brilliance. Every kid has it. Every single one. That radiance…that lucid, brilliant, pure living essence. As a closet perfectionist, I have all too often felt ashamed that I am coming up short as a father to them, repeating some of the generational patterns I inherited…mindlessly repeating the same behaviors of my parents.

And I am not here to blame them. I own it. And my path is my path. My upbringing was right. All of it. My fire is born out of it.

So the thing I mention, holding back my lived, embodied faith in God? It is tied to the faith in myself, and I have felt that faith slippery navigating my role as a Dad of two boys, husband to the most amazing wife, and provider for them all. And that friction comes from living too often in my head rather than in my heart, operating in the matrix vs expressing the true essence of my soul.

My soul’s purpose is to shine light on the way we feed kids and our families. I do it because no one held this essential space for me as a kid, especially as a pre-teen and teenager. A guide showing the way. This is how a human eats to be well, strong, aligned, and alive. And if you really want to have an amazing life, eating this way is at the very least a pretty good idea.

And what more could we do to connect with God, than to honor the sacred light we are born with? And in doing so, we return to that same light within ourselves. In a funny way, is that all there is to self-actualization? To remember who we are inherently, and to learn to just be, and to expand that light instead of letting it dim, which is the path of so many souls.

So, where best can we devote our energy and life force beyond rituals at our places of worship? For me, the ultimate is through our kitchens. Our kitchens are our hearth, our fire. And we parents are the fire keepers. The way in which we tend to it will mean the world to our kids, and it will shape their relationship with the world and themselves.

I imagine a blank page in a notebook. Written in the center is “the kitchen.” It’s circled. From there, we can look at the rest of our lives. Draw a line out and write something, then circle it. This is what mine looks like: job, fitness/health, education, play, travel, faith/rituals.. and you can see that the kitchen makes the most sense to be at the center, as it touches it all. It’s like a beating heart and all the life force flows out and back through it.

This week I launched my pod, Unprocessed. It’s the vocal and conversational pillar of what I am building. It’s a medium for us to voyage through this central “beating heart” of the kitchen. I hope that you feel a part of these conversations and that there is resonance through this exploration of this amazing life.

And, I hope that it will offer us more light, more connection, and more kindling for our fires, both in our hearts and in our homes.

I want to leave you today with a story from my childhood that is tattooed in my heart forever.

I was going down into my basement in our home in Worcester, Mass. I must have been 4 or 5. I fell hard and I was wailing. It was one of those early scary moments where you feel hurt in a certain way for the first time. My Mom came rushing and she held me in her arms. As she soothed me, she explained how I had two Guardian Angels. One on each shoulder. They are always with me, and they were during the fall. From that moment on, I have walked this life believing Mom and the magic of life, even if that belief has fallen to a whisper at times.

And here lies the crux of what I believe to be the most essential aspect of life we could explore…to re-learn how to live through our hearts more than our heads. To live with faith in God, in ourselves, and in each other. That’s a frequency. It’s a vibe. It’s the sweet spot. It’s where we find our flow state. Our kids are born with it. We were born with it. It’s a remembering.

Big hugs and lots of love. Let’s cook with our hearts. Let’s live in our hearts this week and have that guide us and our intentions.

In solidarity,

Aran