on being responsible

Life is demanding, hence we love to be led, told what to do, and be absolved of responsibility.  One thing less to worry about seems often like a really good idea. Yet, when you turn over responsibility, you give up control and agency, and the opportunity to formulate your own approach or direction. 

When you order takeout for dinner, you give up control over the ingredients in your food and what nourishes your body for the convenience of not having to cook.  When you go to the doctor and come unprepared to discuss your own research and preferred approach, you give up control over what goes into your body or the logistics of your healing process.  When you do something because “somebody said so” or someone “told you to,” you relinquish the opportunity to create your very own experience, instead living someone else’s reality.  

Of course, nothing is ever black and white.  Without followers we would all need to be leaders and that doesn’t make sense in a universe of polarities.  Some of us just prefer to be followers, and sometimes we decide when to be led and when to lead.  Nevertheless,  it’s good to do research and make an informed decision in order to have an opinion that’s grown on your own turf instead of someone else’s.   Being responsible is empowering, if involved and more demanding.  You have the opportunity to choose many times each day.

over the head with a bang

Activists, scientists, and politicians tread a fine line between the need to alarm and the need to inspire the public.  Exclusive and relentless gloom and doom messages cause us to cower in fear and overwhelm.  But at one point it’s also time to get our heads out of the sand and decide what future we want to create for our children and grandchildren.

Climate change is no longer drowning the far away Seychelles, it is now violently banging us over the head in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest, and Middle Europe.  Will we get the message in time to avoid our own demise?

Perhaps we have been asking the wrong questions all along because we have been approaching climate change from the perspective of our culture of lack.  It is not so much a question of what we need to less of or what we should deprive ourselves of. Rather, the issue has to do with reverence, appreciation, respect and cooperation.  We must relearn to appreciate nature for our living environment, we must thank nature for the beautiful foods we are able to grow in cooperation with it, we need to redirect our gaze to its majesty and beauty, we have to recognize the abundance nature is showing us all around.  Only when we come from a place of reverence and gratitude, of wanting to work together with nature, not against it, will the answers reveal themselves easily.

Recently this beautifully inspiring short film that attempts to dislodge us from our collective climate change action inertia popped up in my social media feed.  Perhaps it’ll inspire you, to shift from lack to abundance, from inertia to urgency and action.  

it's ok

Friends who come over for a meal and help clean up afterwards are often surprised that we don’t compost.  I’ll buy my favorite whole milk raw milk yogurt in plastic, and sometimes I dilute some smelly toxic bleach stuff to clean the mold spots on the shower grout.

The 80/20 rule applies to me, and doing the best I can instead of being dogmatic and unwavering seems sensible. Composting is currently not convenient, and since we otherwise produce so little garbage, and recycle everything that can possibly be recycled, I won’t feel bad about throwing my produce waste into the trash can.  Plastics from the packaging process leach into peanut butter, so I make sure to buy tahini and nut butters in glass jars.  However, I’ll buy my favorite yogurt in plastic and avoid a lengthy trip to the farm for the single glass jar benefit.  Most of my cleaning gets done with vinegar and a few other inoffensive products.  But sometimes I need to bring in the strong and toxic stuff to get the job done properly. 

To make a long story short, compromising here and there, albeit with awareness, is ok.  No need to be a saint, no need to be dogmatic, no need to be a good girl or boy 100% of the time.  Just doing the best you can and giving yourself a break, with awareness, is ok. 

trust and surrender

Since March 2020 I haven’t felt particularly productive with all this anxiety around the virus, partisan politics and all the social suffering, the accelerating effects of climate change and our collective hesitance to act decisively.  That anxious energy is all around and difficult to escape.  Hence, I haven’t yet had the motivation to write that “other cookbook” that’s been germinating in my mind.  Just like a pregnancy, the cicada cycle, or a sour dough can’t be rushed, an incubation period, personal or societal, takes its own time.  Unfolding takes time. Sometimes it goes fast, sometimes not so much.  

Patience and trust are difficult for us because they require surrender, and surrender runs counter the ego’s need to manipulate and feel in control.  In addition, patience is a challenge because technology has trained us to expect speedy results and resolutions.  Hence, patience runs counter to our culture.  My ego thinks it knows better than my soul and that creates internal struggle and doubt.  “I’m supposed to be writing this book, the idea is already there!”  “But I’m not inspired, the motivation is just not there.”  “Time is money, what am I waiting for?”  “I know, I know.”

If we can only trust ours and the universe’s wisdom in the process of unfolding, resist the urge to try to speed things up, and instead watch what wants to happen, it would promote a greater sense of peace with what currently is.  Things are less predictable than we want them to be.  Trying to force things to happen when they “don’t want to happen yet” is not productive.  This, I need to lean into my own advice to surrender, trust, and be patient.  

What is your experience with watching a process unfold with patience?

food thrills for our times

Some people look for race car driving, roller coaster rides, or bungee jumping for thrills. I look to food for an adventure that stimulates and excites my senses.  I am simply curious how things taste in hopes it’ll be pleasant and delicious, novel and delectable, or perhaps foreign and unexpected.

Many traditional exotic foods are no longer acceptable fare because they’re animal based, their harvesting is unsustainable, or they are cruelly made, and we are starting to know better, think foie gras or shark fin soup.   Hence, we need to look to the plant world for new food excitement.  

Already, I have fallen in love with Chicken of the Woods, a foraged early summer tree mushroom with a surprising meaty texture that is very satisfying.  Puffball mushrooms pop up from one day to the next in meadows a bit later in the season.   Their creamy and dense texture is a surprise and a delight.  The big thick gooey tapioca pearls that have made bubble tea a worldwide phenomenon, are fun to catch through a thick straw while sipping the beverage.  Smooth and slightly sweetened cashew cream has been a delectable revelation to me, and then of course there is color.  Animal products just don’t cut it when it comes to aesthetic appeal.  But cut a watermelon radish open, and surprise!  While a sliced starfruit will put a smile on anyone’s face.

Watermelon Radish

All these sensations delight me, excite me, make me want to discover new tastes, textures, consistencies, combinations, and possibilities.  Let me know if you have made any thrilling vegetarian discoveries.

polarity and the human condition

Judging and evaluating, comparing and taking sides define the human condition.  We exist in a world of opposites.  Remove the concept of darkness, as for example in the Dark Ages, the concept of the Age of Enlightenment is impossible to define.  Take sickness away from our earthly existence and you cannot desire to be healthy since you would never have been sick or had ever experienced sickness in others.  Health would be an incomprehensible, unreal and abstract concept.   A heavy cast iron skillet only conveys its weight to us in comparison to a bag of feathers, not on its own.  

Yet, when we take sides, preferring one over the other, judging one as “good” and the other as “bad,” wanting only what’s “right” and not what’s “wrong,” we only accept half of the picture.  Reality is both, must have both, does not exist otherwise on this earth in the material realm.

Hence equanimity and contentment arise out of accepting that abundance and poverty, hunger and satiatedness, generousness and stinginess must coexist, and only together are One.  One aspect cannot be wished or manipulated away in favor of more of the other.  That’s banging your head against the wall of how the universe functions. Besides, everyone has a different definition of “good” and “bad” and we are now entering sticky philosophical terrain.  The murderer obviously did the only possible thing in that crucial moment, and it was the “right” thing at the time.

Spiritual development begins with the acceptance that what we encounter and experience just “is,” and it is “good” because there is no “bad” or “wrong.”  They both cannot exist without the other, and by necessity are part of the package we signed up for when we came upon this earth.

as abundant as nature

We have been gifted so many plants from friends over the years, by splitting root  (lily of the valley, hosta, hydrangea) or rizome clumps (tiger lilies, irises), separating shoots (lilacs, raspberries) and transplanting runners (strawberries, strawberry begonia), as well as accepting seeds (hollyhocks) and whole seed heads (echinacea).  Many of these plants have grown big enough that we can now share and provide a never ending supply of joy to others.  And we know how quickly animals can multiply, the smaller the faster.  One mouse pair could theoretically produce about 5000 mice in a year.

Nature is just so amazingly abundant that I’m not quite sure how we humans ever came up with this idea of lack and not enough which so permeates our culture (“not enough time,” “not enough money,” “only 2 left,” or “get it while it lasts”).  Perhaps we are so disassociated from nature that we no longer understand its principals. Nature gives so freely, it doesn’t hold on.  It sends its seeds so liberally into the wind by the gazillions.  Abandoned farmland reforests all by itself over the years.  A garden rewilds and overgrows so fast if you don’t constantly pull the weeds and mow the lawn.

The difference between nature and our human behavior is our lack of generosity.  We hold on, tight and tighter.  We stash our money away and get rewarded for it with interest.  During the pandemic we horded toilet paper and meat and created actual shortage.  No wonder then that we live in a culture of stinginess, lack, and miserliness.  Instead of living and modeling abundance, we live and model lack.  Perhaps things would be different if we got rewarded for giving our stuff and money away

To experience abundance, we need to emulate nature’s generosity of giving.  Be like nature.  The more generous you are, the more generous the world around you becomes.

let's make a little room

We just learned that zoo baby births increased by 25% over the past pandemic year because the lack of human visitors put the animals more at ease.  

Good things happen when we humans get out of the way.  When our impact lessens everything else – the air, the water, the animals, the environment in general – recuperates and flourishes, as we saw so immediately last April.

We need to shift our thinking from I to We and consider the bigger picture, the benefit of the many versus the personal benefit to just one person, then we all profit.  Let’s make a little room for the rest of Nature so we can all thrive!

coming to your senses

Just now I walked by a bowl full of ripe peaches and their subtle peachy waft followed me for a few feet into the kitchen.  On the window sill sit two ripening pineapples that exude that characteristic and densely sweet pineappley aroma as I stand at the kitchen sink.  Walking by the roses that are just beginning to flower in the garden is intoxicating, yet so fleeting.  The scent is there one second and gone the next, so subtle, so elusive, so elegant, so delicate.  You can’t catch it, and you can’t make it last forever.  I can only tell  you that my pineapple smells sooooooo pineappley, but I can’t share the aroma with you, and I can’t give you a descriptive since we have no words for scents, only comparatives.  Only if you stand right next to me can we both smell the pineapple.  Yet, even then I can’t be sure you smell the same thing I smell.  A perfume smells different on each person and to each person, and you will smell it differently on your own skin than someone standing next to you will smell it on you.

We take them so much for granted, our senses.  The 6th sense, that of intuition and knowing, may be different, because not everyone believes in it, and it needs to be cultivated to be recognized.  But the other five, those of taste, smell, touch, sound and sight are evident to all of us.  Other than the sense of vision – we can stare at something for hours – the other four senses are so elusive that they force us to be in the present.  One second a scent, or sound, or sensation, or taste, is there, and then it’s already gone.  If we don’t pay attention, we might not even experience it at all.    Some people lost their sense of smell and taste after a bout with Covid, sometimes temporarily, sometimes or a longer period, and it seems to be a very disorienting experience.  It’s as if the universe offered an opportunity to ask ourselves “What do I like better, experiencing tasting and smelling, or not?”  

Our five senses enrich our existence in such manifold ways, they make our life so tremendously more wonderous and pleasurable.  But it takes awareness and “smelling the roses” lest we become so jaded and cynical that we simply brush by an encounter with the delicate scent of lilies of the valley or a gorgeous perfume.  True or not, real estate agents say that the scent of freshly baked apple pie wafting through a house might accelerate the sale.  Our sense of smell alters our perception, making the bearer of the perfume more beautiful or handsome, the apple pie scented home more desirable, or the freshly powdered baby more adorable. Scents awaken our imagination and our memory in magical ways.  Take your ability to smell with a sense of gratitude and awe, stand still for that fleeting second when a scent stirs something in you.  Enjoy it as a gift that enhances and beautifies your day. 

the secret of the universe

From the dawn of time, we have been trying to unlock the secret of the universe in order to find a reason behind why things are the way they are and why we feel the way we feel.  For a long time, those who discovered the secret held on tight to that knowledge which was called “occult” or hidden.  But it was only hidden because we looked in the wrong direction, not because it wasn’t available.  We looked out and played the blame game.  We thought things were “done to us” and felt victimized.  

Turns out we need to look in, not out.  With that comes another revelation.  “The deepest secret is that life is not a process of discovery (passive observation, AN), but a process of creation (active creation, AN),” writes Neale Donald Walsh.  “Life is not a school but an opportunity to create,” he continues.

Surveying the garden plantings with my husband this morning, I complained about the lemon balm crowding out the beautiful red blooming broom shrub we just planted.  That’s exactly the crux of the problem, complaining.  I criticized what is (a passive observation - too much lemon balm).  The better thing to do is moving towards what I’d like to see (no lemon balm in that spot, removing it, transplanting it, substituting it with something else – an act of creation).

With every moment we have the opportunity to choose how we want to feel, to create what we want to experience and who we want to be.  Life is an activity.  It invites involvement, it invites definition of what you want, it requires action and getting off your butt.