the most important thing in life

Life has its ups and downs.  But my husband pointed out that we always ate well, even though we didn’t always buy organic or put wine on the weekday dinner table.  Now I mostly buy organic, enjoy a glass of wine with many weekday dinners, and my food knowledge and awareness have evolved in so many other ways that inform how I shop and cook.  Yet, I still make concessions.  My 2007 car is a bit banged up, most of my clothes come from  2nd hand stores (I actually hate mall shopping, find the selection more creative, and appreciate the idea of reuse), and my iphone 6s needs to be charged all the time because its battery is on its last leg, and you can’t replace it.  

It’s all about priorities and values.  Food is at the very top of my list.  It’s preventative healthcare and health insurance.  It’s quality of life and pleasure (stimulates your senses through color, aroma and smell).  It has to do with caring for our planet (less pesticides means more birds and bees, less poison in my body, and more minerals and nutrients in my food), and the farm workers (better for them if they don’t have to wade in sprayed soil).  Take a look at related posts, good food heals, cheap food kills, and what’s your food worth it to you.

Ponder your priorities.

filling the emptiness anew

Taking down the Christmas tree ends the mystical magic and sparkly festiveness of early winter.  It’s back to day-to-day perfunctoriness, practicality, and normality.  The tree spot is empty.  When I posted a last picture of the tree on social media, accompanied by a melancholic,  “Ohhhh, soon the magic will have to go….,” a friend replied, “You will just have to make some new magic.” That’s it!

In an attempt to keep the magic going some leave their tree up until February.  But it’s just not the same.  It’s procrastination to let go of the old, clean the slate, and start afresh.  “When one door closes another one opens,” is a common saying.  It’s time to let the new year in and embrace the emptiness of the Christmas tree spot. It’s also an opportunity to fill it with brand new magic.  After all, we had to move some things around to make space for the tree in the first place.  

It’s an exciting thought to think of all the wonderful experiences, events, goals, achievements and new magic we can fill not only this new year with, but also a whole new decade.   Emptiness is so full of potential.

conscious consumption

Shopping and eating are a minefield, but now there is a less stressful term for that – conscious consumption.  It’s a minefield because of the many considerations that go into how we eat – dietary, ethical, planetary.  

Many now buy and eat with the wellbeing of animals in mind, with the wellbeing of our planet in mind, and with our own wellbeing in mind.   Conscious consumption is something fairly new and came hand in hand with an exploding awakening.  

We didn’t shop and eat consciously in the 60s, during the age of TV dinners and Mad Men, when we indulged with exuberance in cheap meat and sugar abundance (and as a planet we still do, but individually we are waking up in great numbers out of a deep slumber) – not a care in the world.  Heck, people watched atomic tests in the Nevada desert with awe and excitement.  

The message that our dietary choices also connect with the health – or unhealth – of our planet and our own body – has become loud and clear.  It’s not so much that we have to become frugal, or vegan, or abstainers of all sorts.  It’s more that we need to become aware of the interconnections and implications of how we eat.  Hence, the NY Times writes about the less restrictive plant based diet, instead of the more rigorous and exclusionary veganism. 

How has your attitude towards food and shopping changed in the past ten years?

last post of the year

How was 2019 for you?  Was it an annus mirabilis, or rather an annus horribilis?  Or perhaps neither?  Either way, it’s almost over and in our thoughts we are making room for the new.  As we eat our last breakfast of the year, go to bed one or two more times, wind down our work year, and pause on New Year’s Day, we turn to the future, a year full of potential.  

What do you envision?   What would you like to experience?  What are your dreams?  I updated my vision board, which I see every morning when I come up to the office.  Vision boarding is a powerful tool to clarify your thoughts and wishes, and help manifest change – here an earlier post on it.  

Without dreams and wishes the universe doesn’t know what you want, hence can’t help you manifest it.  We are entering a new decade, may as well dream up some cool wishes for 2020 and the coming decade.

On a global level I strongly wish for a greater momentum on working with and facing the reality of climate change.  On a community level I wish for greater communication and understanding across the many divides we have created.  On a personal level I wish for greater kindness and gratitude.

What wishes have you whipped up for 2020?

merry merry

We don’t celebrate Thanksgiving where I come from.  Yet, it has become one of my favorite holidays, and I have wholeheartedly incorporated it into our family traditions, and wish of course all people around me a very happy Thanksgiving. When we lived in Hong Kong in the late 1980s everyone wished us a happy lunar new year, and we reciprocated the wish, even though it’s not one of our holidays.   

Christmastime is very joyful in America, filled with parties, opulent decorations, twinkle lights everywhere, and cheerful Christmas music. Offices and organizations have staff and member parties to celebrate the season, friends get together for feast and fun, it’s convivial and inclusive even if you don’t celebrate the underlying religious reason, or don’t celebrate Christmas at all.  For us Christmas has always been more a cultural than a religious celebration, and I just love getting carried away in this sparkly, red and green tide, and all the togetherness.  

In recent years we have all tried so hard to be politically correct by wishing everyone happy holidays, afraid to offend or exclude those who don’t celebrate Christmas.  It’s impossible to please everyone, and every wish comes from the heart and is well meant.  Hence, I wish all of you, whatever you believe, whatever your cultural background, a very merry Christmas, because it’s a joyful time of year, full of light and laughter and sparkle and togetherness, and that’s what I wish you. 

P.S. Please check the website for the latest workshop and talk dates.

your own madeleine

Before my daughter went back to college after Thanksgiving, she made the spice Christmas cookies from her German great-grandmother, my grandmother, to take with her.  Yesterday, my son, away at grad school, asked for that same recipe.  Those particular cookies, like no others, evokes the taste of Christmas for us.  They conjure up visions of sugar plums so to speak, or rather the flavors of German Christmas.

 Cocoa powder makes the cookies deep dark brown, they are covered with white powdered sugar glazing, and they combine the chocolaty aroma of the cocoa with the intense spice tastes of cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg.

my grandmother’s German spice cookies

In his famous madeleine episode Proust describes how eating the cake spontaneously resurrects childhood memories from somewhere deep down in his subconscious. 

For me my grandma’s spice cookies evoke not only the taste of Christmas but also memories of her; for my children, who did not get to know her, these cookies have become the most evocative of all Christmas tastes.  Now that they are older, they both make the cookies themselves to travel back memory lane to their younger selves and earlier Christmases.

What is your madeleine?  What memories does it bring back in you?

the bigger connection

We’re coming to a time of year that more than any other time is about connecting, not only with family, friends, or community, but also on a bigger level to culture and Nature.  Thanksgiving is less about eating turkey and lots of pie, or watching football, or all the prep work and cleaning up after a crowd, although it’s an important cultural aspect and expression.  

Instead, it’s about being together and feeling connected to something bigger. Thanksgiving, as any harvest festival, is about our deep connection to the Earth because it provides us with everything we need to live.  Without good soil and a good harvest, we perish.  If we tend the soil sustainably, we thrive. Everything else is icing on the cake.

Hence, Thanksgiving is about thanking the Earth, our first and foremost nurturer, Mother of all Mothers.  It is about being grateful, not only for the people we celebrate with, but for our existence, for spirit, for that which made us and put us here.  Let’s keep this bigger picture in mind this coming week with the help from the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address: Greetings to the Natural World, which thanks all of Nature for making us possible.  

Thank you.

wiser, not older

Next year I will hit my 60th run-around-the sun, and I am reflecting on all the ways in which maturing is more fun, more grounding, or even perhaps more desirable than remaining young forever.

Traditional societies have revered elders for their wisdom and perspective.  In our younger societies we have come to worship youth as more desirable – my theory being that we’re deflecting our fear of death, or maybe we just don’t think wrinkles are fashionable (although not everyone becomes wrinkly as they age). Young people may be creative and exuberant, technologically with it (absolutely important in our day and age), but they lack experience, and potentially depth, because they haven’t been around the block. 

Nowadays “older” depends so much on your personal outlook.  Ernestine Shepherd is an 80-year old body builder who began training not so long ago. Tao Porchon-Lynch, the 101-year old ballroom dancer and yogini, still  teaches yoga several times a week.  Bless people who can afford to retire in their 50s, but not all wish to do so.   Many professors teach into their 70s and even 80s.   Authors can practice their craft until the day they die.  86-year old Ruth Bader Ginsburg still sits on the Supreme Court, and I know many people who travel into their high 80s.  And why not?

Our thinking about aging and “old age” is evolving.  When AARP sent me a card a few years ago I laughed it all the way into the trash can.  The French have broadened their senior citizen categorization from le troisième age, the 3rdage, the over 60s, to the quatrième age, the fourth age, the over 80s.  “Old” seems to relate more to how you look and feel and think instead of your actual age.  The Huffington Post published a chart that shows activity peaks according to age.  Peaks in life satisfaction, happiness with your body, and psychological wellbeing are all achieved starting in your late 60s.  And aren’t those the markers that count most?

Is it all in the mind? Are we our worst enemy?  To some extent yes.  How do you think about old age?  What are your plans?  

unpacking our children

Raising children is a magical experience of unfolding, full of surprises.  As parents we put so much energy and effort into providing our kids with fertile ground for their development.  Loving, encouraging and appreciating them, teaching them life skills, setting boundaries, modeling how to operate in this wild world, and inspiring them to come into their own, is  a complex dance of trying to read between the lines to anticipate who they are meant to become, all the while working from our own expectations and hopes (and trying not to let those take over). 

Our children come into this world with their own potentialities, their own natural knacks and tendencies, their own likes and dislikes, their own particular personalities.  But then they need our input, our guidance, our feedback, to navigate what they have been given within a complex world full of possibilities and pitfalls, steering them while loosening the reins gradually as they grow older.

It’s almost like a most precious present, packaged in many layers of giftwrap, that parents and children are unpacking together, or peeling an onion one layer at a time, to discover what’s concealed underneath it all.  Mind you, the unwrapping continuous until the day we die.  I am still peeling my own onion, still discovering more of who I want to be, still working towards my full potential.  

fake meat or authentic veggies?

Since the Tofurky phenomenon for Thanksgiving and otherwise, a tofu based and turkey breast shaped hunk of meat substitute, I have had my gripes with food that emulates something other than what it is. Since Michael Pollan and our evolving food awareness I thought we had embraced “eating foods that our grandmothers would have recognized.”  

The whole thing about the Green Revolution of the 1950s has been to feed the masses cheaply.  From this effort also arose the manufacturing of food products, supposedly to save us time and promote convenience.   But feeding the corporate profit machine was its ultimate result, not our health.  

The newest thing is openly called fake meat, and every effort is being made to create the most authentic meat taste and look, bloody drips and all – see a huge article in Wednesday’s NYT food section.  After tofurky came the meat substitute Quorn, now there is fake meat, all made up of all sorts of ingredients, GMO and otherwise. In the end they are all manufactured foods, not something nature made. It’s not alive.  It’s made in a factory. It comes in a package with a long ingredient list, and it’s not more authentic than a TV dinner.

We may be smiling about TV dinners, but if, in this new age of authenticity, we’re looking for a health promoting diet we might want to get away from “product” and eat real food.