Cultivating Community

Teasing my next post in the Inner Galaxy series, part II of my gut restoration odyssey via FMT therapy, kimchi, and mooning over our collective interconnectedness.

Living in Costa Rica, my most beloved belongings are in a storage unit in Boulder. Deciding to continue living here till fall while I work on my next creation, and immerse myself in deep personal growth, I am anchoring into a my beach casita for the short term. As I’m settling in, there are things I am missing from my home kitchen. I am itching to create a nurturing culinary space for myself. I’ve realized how much I'm missing the microbial communities I created within my kitchens. I’m missing my ferments and artisan vinegar crocks, my tended and loved SCOBY’s from kombucha and various vinegars, and summer ferments from Farmers Market finds, ripening on my favorite red cupboard. I’m missing kimchi to munch on and curtido to add to grilled meat and tacos and my ever changing kombucha capturing the essence of what’s in season now.

The thing that I learned as I began to ferment regularly, both in my restaurants and at home, is that I was cultivating, tending, and really loving an entire microbial community that was thriving in all my kitchens, eagerly awaiting the next ferment they could deliciously convert into powerful health giving foods. These potent microbes lived in the air, on the organic fruits and vegetables fresh from the farm, smelling of fresh earth and ripe sweetness. More ferments beget more microbial life. I began a love affair with these microbes actually, realizing as I loved them in my tending and reverence, so they loved me, growing in strength and vigor as a flower does to sun.

I began to see how and when they flourished, as a loved house plant or beloved pet when nurtured with the right environment. I saw them get cranky in the winter and be slow to unfold their gifts in new homes without their direct kin yet cultivated in the environment. I began to deepen my reverence for working with challenging and esoteric ferments like koji and sung the song of the transcendence of naturally fermented Vin and Pét-nats.

I hope to spark in you a reverence as well. Maybe you won’t take up a lifestyle as an active fermenter, but I hope to inspire you by its sheer magnitude and our complex interconnectedness with nature and the ground beneath our feet. I hope to provide a glimmer of transcendence in you as you begin to allow the wisdom of this primordial relationship to awaken within you. After all, our relationship with this external and unseen microbial world is a mirror to our relationship with the unseen microbial community within us.

As you allow these truths to emerge from within you, this is actually a stepping stone in exercising Radical Self Responsibility for your health. That means taking complete ownership of everything, all of who you are, and begin to be accountable and responsible for the garden of health, wisdom and birthright within you.

Currently, I’m working on my second article in the Inner Galaxy series, deepening our understanding of how this interconnectedness builds our health and resilience, bringing us into our dynamic potentiality.

My first article - Meeting Your Inner Galaxy, I share my gut healing odyssey with Fecal Transplant Therapy (FMT Therapy) in the UK in 2018. I’ll be continuing that story and sharing the profound ways that treatment completely transformed my gut, my immune system, my skin and brain health. During that radical gut restoration experience and the incredible results that followed, I began to question - what actually makes us ill?

I’ll follow that with my signature kimchi recipe, along with resources for deepening your relationship with your Inner Galaxy. Looking forward to your feedback.

With love and kimchi,

Christine