Ethical Adulthood: A Detroit Soundtrack | Closer to the Ground by Joy of Cooking

Ethical Adulthood: A Detroit Soundtrack — Episode 2: “Closer to the Ground”

In this episode, Andrea reflects on Joy of Cooking’s 1971 song “Closer to the Ground” as a reminder that ethical adulthood is not about rising above ordinary life, but coming back into contact with it.

Through kitchens, bodies, machines, spirituality, onions, AI, Instagram, and the inconvenient fact of having hips, this episode asks what it means to stop looking for certainty in symbols, systems, rituals, and technology — and instead return to the ground beneath us.

A warm, funny, embodied meditation on ordinary life, practical joy, and the strange wisdom of remembering we are humans with bodies we need to connect with to stay wise.

Episode themes: groundedness, embodiment, spiritual bypassing, technology, ordinary joy, ethical adulthood, Joy of Cooking, Season 2.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Well, welcome in to Ethical Adulthood, a Detroit soundtrack. Today we are talking about Closer to the Ground by Joy of Cooking. In episode one, we talked about smooth. We keep it real, or we admit we're just playing the game of almost living. Closer to the ground is season two saying keeping it real means staying close to what is actually happening here in our ordinary lives. And Joy of Cooking is exactly right here. Earthy, female-led, intelligent, unshowy, musically loose, but definitely not sloppy. The New Yorker was already noting in 1971 that the band stood out because Tony Brown and Terry Garthwaite were not playing the usual passive, desperate female rock roles. They sounded self-possessed, inventive, and emotionally contained in a powerful way. And that matters here because this is not music floating above life. These are women playing with authority, humor, heat, and intelligence, not performing fragility, not begging to be chosen, and certainly not decorating somebody else's song. They are in the room. They are in the body. And they are cooking. So the album is called Closer to the Ground. It's the title song I'm discussing, and the band is Joy of Cooking. And I want to start right there, not with analysis or a life lesson, not with a 10-point plan for how to become more grounded. Because please, we have all suffered enough under the tyranny of the 10-point plan. I want to start with the band name. Joy of Cooking. Already we're closer to the ground or in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, making food. Things like heat, timing, smell, taste, the pleasure of labor for our loved ones, nourishment, and making a mess. So already we are in the body. The name itself is a correction. Because so much of modern adulthood pulls us away from the ground, away from the body, away from the kitchen, away from ordinary competence and ordinary pleasure. We are supposed to be productive, impressive, informed, optimized, available, emotionally regulated, visually coherent, and ideally monetizable. But cooking does not care about our personal brand. Cooking asks a different question. Are you hungry? Is the pan hot enough? Did you put salt in the water? Are the onions burning? Is there enough for everyone? Can you make something good out of what is actually here? That's a very difficult ethical universe. And this band, they were cooking. Go give the song a listen if you don't know it. And I bet you don't know it because it's an underground diamond. I'll wait. Man, I wish I could play the song for you right here, but copyrights matter. The joy of cooking in musicianship or in the kitchen, it's not abstract joy. It's not inspirational quote joy. It's the kind of joy that appears in reality, not in soft focus wellness photography next to a woman in linen holding a mug with both hands. It's practical joy. Embodied joy. Grounded joy. The joy of taking raw ingredients and making a meal. The joy of feeding yourself and maybe someone else. The joy of knowing enough to improvise. The joy of making do. The joy of garlic hitting warm oil. Of beans and rice becoming dinner. Standing barefoot in the kitchen. Slightly tired, slightly annoyed, but still participating in life. So when a band called Joy of Cooking gives us a song called Closer to the Ground, I feel like we should pay attention. Because the whole thing is already teaching. The band name says, Joy is not somewhere else. The song title says, and don't go looking for it in the clouds. Closer to the ground. It's not higher or brighter, more optimized, more evolved. It's not more marketable. It's not more healed in a way that photographs well. Closer to the ground. There's something almost medicinal about that phrase. Because, well, after a long season of rupture and grief, instability, uncertainty, nervous system overwhelm, and trying very hard not to become a complete menace to ourselves and everyone around us, there can be a temptation to imagine that healing means rising above life, becoming detached, becoming serene and spiritually elevated above our followers on Instagram. But you know, that's not this version of ethical adulthood. I think ethical adulthood asks us to just come down, to get next to the earth, next to what's happening, and inside our sensations and perceptions.

SPEAKER_00 7:21

To remember that we have bodies and pantries and bills and weather. Aging faces.

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Gardens that don't care that we're going on vacation. Pets with medical appointments. A nervous system that may be very sincere, but is also sometimes just dehydrated.

SPEAKER_00 8:10

And somehow this is where life is. Here. On this ordinary, unstable, ridiculous, beautiful ground.

SPEAKER_01 8:25

And then the song does something very interesting. It warns us about two ways that we try to leave the ground. One is ancient. We look for certainty in signs, rituals, astrology, spiritual systems, religious performances, anything that might tell us what life means before we have to actually live it. And the other is modern. We look for meaning in discovery, machinery, technology, progress, invention, anything that promises we can outsmart the ache of being alive. And listen, I'm not against ritual. I am not against science. I am certainly not against machines, because, well, here we are. But the song is suspicious of anything that tempts us to abandon direct contract contact with life. And then it gives us this line, which feels completely impossible for 1971. If you spend your days talking to a machine, you might forget that you're a human being. Don't let it make a fool of you. Remember who you're talking to. Yeah. This from San Francisco in 1971, before smartphones, before the internet, before algorithms, before AI companions, before we began asking machines to organize our feelings, our choices, our politics, our meals, our grief, our creativity, our meaning. And the irony, it's not lost on me, folks. Here I am talking into a machine, using Bluetooth to upload the recording, making a podcast with a machine, putting the recording together with a video with a machine, and the song says, Don't let it make a fool of you. Not because machines are evil, but because forgetting the ground is too easy when the upper air is so rarefied.

SPEAKER_00 10:56

And what does the song offer instead?

SPEAKER_01 11:00

Feel your feelings. Stop overthinking your life. Be in your body. Be in nature. Be here on planet Earth. Let us be stewards of our bodies, our families, our neighborhoods, our ecosystems. That's it. That's ethical adulthood. And a funky, bass-heavy, fantastic early 70s rock song. And if you listen to the lyrics, and I know you will, there's not a thing about optimization, about figuring out your brand, about making your mark on the world. There's nothing in there about tolerating discomfort, repairing rupture, naming power, grieving loss, or acting without symbols and signs leading the way towards certainty. It's just get down to earth. There's a kind of spirituality, you know, that wants to leave the body. And I understand the appeal. The body is somewhat of an inconvenience. It has hips. It has digestion. It has parts that wear out. It needs like a liter or more of water every single day, which frankly feels excessive. It gets tired. It gets hungry. It gets inflamed. It gets older. The body does not care how many profound realizations we've had. The body just keeps raising its hand and saying, Excuse me, we are trying to stay alive here. And this is where ethical adulthood gets seriously personal. Because we can use spiritual aid float spirituality to float away from the body, or we can let spiritual practice return us to the body with more kindness. Not worship of the body, not control of the body, not punishment, not summer body, not high vibration body, not whatever fresh nonsense the internet is selling us this week. Just this body, this ordinary body that carries us through the day closer to the ground. So maybe the practice this week is very simple. Get lower. Sit on the floor or lie on the floor. Better yet, go lie down in the grass. Put your feet and your hands in dirt. You got an expensive manicure? Well, buy a nail brush. Cook something with onions. Rock a won the block in good, comfortable clothes and shoes. Drink more water. Yeah. Notice the weather. Stop trying to become somebody. Let the song remind you that ethical adulthood is not always a climb. Sometimes maturity is a descent, a return. A willingness to just be here right now and say yes to it. Not above life, not outside life, not managing life from a safe intellectual distance, but right inside it. Closer to the body, closer to the truth, closer to the ordinary, closer to the ground. And maybe that is where the joy has been hiding. Not circling anything profound. Just here. Closer to the ground.