Is a donut the new yin-yang? How does one man physically unite all of time and space? What do volcanos, skunks and whole wheat bread have to do with kung fu and the ultimate nature of reality? My new novel Secret Recipes from the Kung Fu Bakery
Drunken frat boys, a ferocious mountain lion and ethereal glowing serpents helped convince Stu to give up his intense kung fu training years ago. But when he receives a psychic summons from his former master Rocco, channeled through the mouth of an unsuspecting 11 year-old, Stu finds himself thrust back into Rocco’s world – a world where martial arts, bread and samba beats are kneaded together into a mind-blowing mixture.
Secret Recipes from the Kung Fu Bakery
Read the first chapter below, and visit amazon.com
Chapter 1: All Must Return
The wind was on a mission, that much seemed clear. I’d caught it rushing off Round Lake and prowling through the forest as soon as I left my cabin in the morning. The teasing, searching way it hit up the trees, I knew that something more than just atmospheric pressure was in for a change. Breakfast, cleanup and assembly pushed the wind out of my mind for a time. Then while I was leading a hike through the swamp, the wind swirled again and for a moment I could’ve sworn it carried words on its wings. I strained to catch the message but what seemed like a voice soon dissolved into a rhythmic rustling of leaves. On and off for the rest of the morning the wind kept flirting with me. Even from the lunch table inside the dining hall I could still hear it singing its vague proposition.
“What’s on the schedule after rest hour?” I called to Faith over the din of a hundred 6th graders chomping on government issue hot dogs.
“Leaf Lab,” she answered.
It’s true we had plenty of games and hands-on activities to liven up the Leaf Lab, making the learning about the beeches, aspens, maples, and lindens that filled the surrounding Maine woods much less dry than you might think. But right then an hour in the Leaf Lab seemed like a dreary prospect.
Faith easily read my mood. “What’s wrong?”
I looked out the window. “That wind… it’s really stirring something. Think we could skip the Leaf Lab and take the kids outside instead?”
Faith followed my gaze out to the dancing trees. “How about an Art Walk?”
I turned to her with a smile. “Perfect.”
Of all the activities we ran at the Round Lake Environmental Education Center, the Art Walk was my favorite. Many of the students had never spent much time in the outdoors before coming to Round Lake with their school, and an Art Walk was a great way to help draw to the surface the new awareness that began bubbling deep inside them. I didn’t have reason to expect much from this particular class though. Twelve 6th graders from a public school in Newton, Massachusetts, these kids were more caught up in negotiating their own treacherous social jungle than they were in tapping into the nature groove.
There’s a finger of pine forest and rock that plucks Round Lake like a banjo and it’s long been the prime site for Art Walks. In the five minutes it took to get there from the dining hall Faith and I pointed out perched orioles, flying loons, nesting ducks, hopping rabbits and brooding toads. From far away the whine of a chain saw droned across the lake, the only minor cut into the natural grain of the moment.
We gathered around the base of a stately old sugar maple and Faith gave the basic Art Walk intro talk. The kids had several minutes to gather anything that struck them from the nearby environment – leaves, rocks, sticks, pine cones – with a mind towards minimal impact on the forest. Then each student was to pick a patch of ground a few feet across as a canvas and create a work of art using these natural materials. Normally I would join the activity as well, but restless from the roiling wind I clambered instead amongst the boulders by the lakeshore while keeping a distracted eye on the students.
I gave a shout when time was up and we regrouped to examine each work as its creator gave an explanation. It’s always good to have a teacher start off and give the students a basic pattern to fall back on, so the group convened first around Faith. She had taken two curving downed white pine braches, one with dead needles and the other with fresh green needles, and placed them in an intertwined, graceful spinning figure. Sprinkled around this central motif were a dozen or so pine cones.
“The two branches symbolize life and death,” she explained, “and I put them together in this spinning way to show the constant change in the cycle of nature. The pinecones all around them represent the power of creation and the interconnectedness of living things. Think about it – one tree can produce hundreds of pinecones, and each one of those has the capacity to produce trees that will generate more pinecones and on it goes.”
Pretty heavy for 6th graders perhaps, but Faith was gifted with a simple eloquence that let her pull it off. Watching her as she spoke, standing there in a plain gray wool sweater with old jeans and hiking boots, her long black hair pinned up but struggling free in the breeze, her soft brown eyes scanning the children and her finely featured face flush with enthusiasm, I couldn’t help but admire the work of art. And I’m not talking about the branches and pinecones.
Next to go was Keith. Skinny, short and scrappy, with a gaunt face and a haystack of blond hair, Keith had a slightly manic energy that was actually sort of endearing, at least for the week he was there at Round Lake.
Keith began with a nervous voice. “I uh… made a map of some places around here. This oak leaf here is the big red oak tree up by the dining hall. And the line of rocks there is the lake shore.”
“That’s great, Keith.” I served up a softball. “What’s that pile of sticks in back?”
“That’s the woodpile for the bonfire tomorrow.”
“And the pinecones and rocks over in the corner?” Faith asked.
“Those are the cars in the parking lot. I put pinecones in for the American cars cause they grew here and I put rocks for the foreign cars.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Rocks are from here too,” observed his classmate Briana. Personally I would have let it slide, but she did have a point.
“Well… the rocks are different cause… the rocks are like, smaller and you can move them around but pine cones are trees. They’re much bigger. They’re from here.”
“OK!” I politely intruded before things got too much more disjointed. It’s another perk of the Art Walk – there are a dozen ready excuses to change the focus whenever a diversion is necessary. “Thanks, Keith. Let’s move on. Who’s next?”
“Mine’s over here,” called out Scott, a thoroughly average-seeming kid, kind of quiet and didn’t draw much attention to himself but got along well enough.
At first I was distressed to see a gaping hole in the ground by Scott. I saw quickly, however, that the hole was a pit that had held a good-sized stone. Scott had pulled the stone out of the ground and pushed it aside a few inches, and the effort it must have taken him surprised me. For a couple of feet around the hole, Scott had cleared the forest floor of its usual debris of sticks, rocks, leaves and the like.
“Looks like you’ve been working hard, Scott,” Faith offered. “What’s going on?”
“The rock is the world,” he said as he turned his eyes to mine. “Not just the planet, with its myriad creatures scuttling about like the beetles and centipedes here, but the entire physical, mental and spiritual multiverse that is the reality we experience.”
Faith and I couldn’t help exchanging perplexed looks. We’d heard plenty of this kind of talk before, but never from a 6th grader. I would have laughed at the looks on the faces of the other students if I hadn’t been so startled myself.
“You’ll notice,” Scott continued, “that the world is poised near the edge of the abyss. Not so close as to plunge into it, but never able to escape from the fact that the abyss is its Ursprung, and clearly, inevitably, to the abyss all must return. Or at least to the Kung Fu Bakery.” I drew in a sharp breath. “Come right away,” he added, “nothing’s happening.”
“What?” cried a few of the kids. Others seemed embarrassed or just stood there thoroughly clueless. But I got the reference, and quickly realized just what was going on.
“That’s not fair.” I said in a low voice. “Stop it.” The few kids who heard me probably thought I was referring to their surprised reaction to Scott, but my real audience was Rocco. It was he who had been speaking through Scott, a power I was distressed to see that he had developed in the years since I worked and trained under him in Colorado.
Faith made the connection too and gave me a serious look. She then gathered herself and dipped into the well for another Art Walk diversion. “That’s pretty weird, Scott, I have to say, but very interesting. You must read a lot, huh? OK, we’ve got lots more art to see, whose is this over here?”
Scott shook himself briefly, then lowered his eyes and turned away. Led by Faith, the crowd moved on murmuring but I lingered, staring into the pit, the tiny abyss. I was being summoned back to the Kung Fu Bakery. But why?
The next morning, Faith emerged from our cabin behind the dining hall to find me sitting on the front steps. The fingers of my left hand played idly across the two inch scar on the back of my head as I watched the smoke from a mooched cigarette swirl high in the still air until it was lost in the flat gray light of the sky. I would normally be finishing up my daily chi kung routine right around that time, harmonizing body, mind and spirit, strengthening and regulating the energy flowing through my being. The fact that I was sitting on my ass, poisoning myself with nicotine and tar instead made it plain to Faith that something wasn’t right. But then after yesterday, that wouldn’t have been too tough to figure out.
She stood over me, “So, where’d you get the smoke?”
“Where else?” I blurted. “Marge.” Our resident nurse, Marge was the only native Mainer and the only regular smoker on the Round Lake staff. More than once we’d remarked that having the nurse be the only smoker around just didn’t seem right. That is, of course, until you were jonesin’ for a cigarette. Then it was just fine.
A few moments passed, then I said flatly, “We gotta go back to Colorado. I don’t see any other choice.”
“You may have to go,” Faith replied. “Rocco’s your guru, not mine. I’m not sure I’m up for it.”
I winced. I never liked it when Faith referred to Rocco as a guru. It just sounds too new-agey. But in the strict sense she was right. “Guru” literally means “heavy” in Sanskrit, and plainly Rocco still carried plenty of weight in my life.
Faith sat down next to me. She waved the smoke away with her hand, but gently enough so that I wouldn’t read anything into it.
“Listen, Stu, we’ve only got a few more days here this season, try not to think about it too much. You know, like Rocco used to say, ‘Hold onto the question and let go of the answer.’”
“Ha!” I exclaimed. “Easier said than done. Anyway, it’s the answer that’s got a hold of me. I just can’t stop mulling it over right now. How did he pull that off with Scott yesterday? What’s going on out there? What does he have in store for me, for us?”
Faith cast me a skeptical glance. “Should I just leave you alone?” she asked.
I patted her knee and managed a smile. “Yeah, thanks.” She stood and went back into the cabin as I stubbed out my cigarette in the dirt and looked out again through the woods. It was mid-October and the aspen, beech, and maple leaves had already turned and most had fallen to the ground. In the featureless, diffuse gray light, the forest took on a stark appearance. The mottled brown, gold, and red forest floor was blurred and hazy. Dark trunks rose abruptly from this carpet in a scattered colonnade and stabbed leafless branches into the opaque sky. Even with the wind, yesterday had been sunny, cool, a nearly perfect fall day. By the looks of this morning, winter was here.
