tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1878205807786822602023-12-12T13:54:59.094-05:00peacefoodlovecontemplative cook, teacher, & mother of a methods maven. padme of process & food mettāphorist, learning to feed the heart-mind.
Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.comBlogger32125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-15376463550512178872016-08-10T11:08:00.000-04:002016-08-10T11:08:18.513-04:00A Pliny the Elderwood Cutting Board: The Raw Materials of Age + Utility <div class="p1">
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<span class="s1">We revere and even hold dear an older, battled-scarred cutting board.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Its grooves and crosshatches are badges of honor of all we have tasted, and all that has carved us.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Even its wayward little oops-slivers of bareness here and there remind us of all the work we have done, all the practice we have logged, all the cutting time we have put into this test kitchen.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Even that ineffable perfume of thyme-time itself, embedded in the fibers of the wood, smells love-ly to us. It’s an olfactory comfort in this case, time. Smells like Home.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">When I look at this little ‘70s bread board (which I actually use as an all-purpose platform, not just for big staff-of-life matters), I see so easily, and deeply appreciate, its faithful, hinter-hook hanging, always-right-there utility. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">I see kindness on a cup hook, an extension of myself (that is not really an extension of my small self but <i>is who I really am</i>, of course), always within reach.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I admire it for exactly what it is—especially its age.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">We do not extend this sort of fluid definition to our bodies, our hearts, or our minds. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">These we generally find and judge to be: old, worn out, patchy, about-to-crack-any second, dried up, no longer level even by farmhouse counter standards.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">We believe we're not end-grain enough to be sought after any longer.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">We tell ourselves that old chestnut, that we're one centimeter short of a the coveted butcher-block stature.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">We think and feel that, because we’re not made of the "material du jour,” we're less than—Olive wood</span></div>
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<span class="s1">is so yesterday! Today it's bamboo! Tomorrow it could be teak!</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Of course, the material <i>we’re really made of</i> is not the skin we’re in. But we forget this (if we’ve ever been fortunate to remember it) when things get choppy.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Let me butcher’s wax grand for a second and say that this, that the old body-image meat of the matter is quite true for most women, in the West, at this time.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">In truth an against-the-feminine grain runs all the way through pretty much every modern society.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">When I say feminine, I’m not talking about assigned "female parts”; I’m talking about feminine <i>energy</i>, which is not just old, it's ancient. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">(In fact we all have the feminine within us and can tap into its fierce-nurturing, creative energy as a mise en place for ourselves, if not the world at large.)</span></div>
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But we in the West don’t equate age with wisdom or utility.</div>
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<span class="s1">We just call it old and hang it up to dry.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">But this, belief about age, turns out to be like the one pesky grain of rice that's overshot the countertop of awareness onto the floor—it’s only a thought, and only a feeling.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">And both of these—thoughts and feelings--are, well, unending consumables in this life. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">And then, after the rice-spill realization, there is the resounding thud, like a block of burl wood hitting the inside of a stainless sink, that we are not and can never be, physically, made of sustainable materials.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">But this is a good thud for me. Because what can resonate then is that <i>this</i> is exactly what I’ve got, not something else.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">This is the board I’ve got to play, in the body I’ve got, in the life I’ve got, lock, stock, Crate & Barrel.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">So why is it that we let how it was, or what it might have been, consume us?</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Me. I mean me, obviously.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Because, not to be bag-of-marrow-bones/contents of mind crass, but the body like the board is really just a longer-term kitchen consumable, and it needs care if it’s going to last (while it can).</span></div>
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<span class="s1">As a proud “owner” of a 40</span></div>
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<span class="s1">yo+ cutting board, I can tell you that I’ve not always taken that kind of care. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">Though the body is, if we’re lucky, not a roll of paper towels-on-speed dial, or a jar of fast-gone chipotles, we’re bound by the laws of nature to go through it. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">All of this is much easier to swallow, by the way, if you imagine Alan Watts in your kitchen as I often do, whisking up some matcha green tea and deviling your eggs with these truthiest of truths.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">That’s because masters can be that spoonful of stevia that makes the medicine go down. That is also a truth.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">But equally true is your own (universal) truth, pared away and pared away, and finally tasted for yourself as “new."</span></div>
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<span class="s1">And, besides I remind myself, you don’t need to be <i>new</i>, Stacia. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">You just need to be Now.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Back to the drawing and cutting board—over and over and over (and over) again.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">Which is why a little beeswax, with its quiet, softening, and protective sheen like that mythical in-your-skin ease, can serve you well when applied now and again and again with self-compassion.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">We could all benefit from a little beeswax ease, gently applied. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Elder" target="_blank">Pliny the Elder </a>is an ancient author of all kinds of things you probably hear, say, and really do know deep down, all the time. Things you can borrow like a cup of sugar and make your own, such as: "Hope is the pillar [of salt] that holds up the world.</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.drjudithorloff.com/" target="_blank">Judith Orloff </a>is, well, Judith Orloff and no one else--soft-speaker, writer, intuitive doctor, empath, and bee-balm of love applier to all souls in her sphere. In her latest book<i>, The Ecstasy of Surrender</i>, of the surrender of aging she says, "What matters is that you must trust your gut," a reminder for which I am deeply grateful, and that how I find myself writing this at 11 am on a Tuesday. </div>
Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-58298930239007218972015-03-22T11:48:00.002-04:002015-03-22T11:49:17.497-04:00The Elixir of Plain Tap Water: Happy World Water Day!<br />
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Our waters are our fluid anchor to this world—to this very body. The meta (and metta) boat of love & growth <i>only</i> sails by the graciousness of its cleansing expanse.<br />
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So, in honor of World Water Day, and after a very long time dry here, I thought I'd simply share a daily practice of mine.<br />
Adapt the recipe as you like; it's not original, just another form of the water offerings found across the world.<br />
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Every day, I fill this little cup (don't think I don't love the wordplay of "Anchor") from the well and place it on my kitchen-ledge to remind me all day: "just this much clarity about my part in things," "just this much."<br />
If I can look the water in the eye at night as I do the dishes, then this is a good day.<br />
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The cup sits and catches the sun all day. It catches the soundwaves of my clinking-spoons and coffee cups busy-ness, my keyboard clatter, and my incessant knife-sharpening.<br />
I'm sure eternal ants crawl across the lip, taste and keep to their tasks, and a mote or two of farmhouse dust wafts by.<br />
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The cup sits all night: clarity's sentinel.<br />
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In the morning when I get up, before anything else, I drink the contents in the cup--a day in the life, distilled-- very, very slowly and deliberately, reflecting on and drinking in the whole world in the cup. The hardest piece is ALLOWING myself to drink it. Why is it so hard to quench myself honestly?<br />
Allowing the water to purify me is sometimes difficult--but doable. Allowing myself to know I deserve this, that there is no separation between me and the water. Being clear on the fact that I <i>can</i> be fully present today. That it's a choice, no matter how turbulent everything outside that cup seems, to remain in the still pool inside.<br />
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And so we start <i>all</i> over again every day with this choice: empty cup, empty dinner plate, empty calories that are entirely our choice about how to fill.<br />
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This can be a very powerful, though seemingly very small, practice.<br />
Delicious poet (and master cook) William Blake said sweet delight comes when:<br />
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[We] see a World in a Grain of Sand<br />
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,<br />
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand<br />
And Eternity in an hour.<br />
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I am finding that just 150 ml of this intention works pretty well, too.<br />
And, whatever you water, grows.<br />
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So often in the past I have watered the seeds of my own fear, anxiety, dis-ease!<br />
But the tide is turning, gentles. Slowly and irrevocably (in an impermanent way).<br />
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So this practice helps when I'm feeling overwhelmed by negativity--when it all starts feeling like open waters (not the good kind). I remind myself that even those tsunami events and people who appear to oppose us, who are what Joseph Campbell beautifully (and euphemistically) termed "threshold guardians," are made up of 70% water--and so,100% light.<br />
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When you hang out cooking in the contemplative kitchen with the greenhouse window long enough, you start to wonder how it is you never really thought all that deeply on where the light was coming from. The good news is, every morning, if you're lucky, you get another chance to notice--to look around and look up.<br />
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What if I told you that I'm pretty sure, after all of my experiments in the kitchen-mind--my soaring souffles and my dead-weight pancake-flops--that this holy grail, this phantom elixir that we are all after on this journey, is actually nothing more than what comes from our own wells?<br />
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It's a heck of a wellspring-board into choice, then.Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-32949116335073702532014-06-21T13:25:00.001-04:002014-06-21T13:30:47.961-04:00Buddhafest: A Festival for Heart + Mind ~ Eating Out-In from The Pantry of Interdependence<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Wellbeing is a warrior’s recipe, and it’s not one you can come up with all by yourself from scratch in your own kitchen-mind—no matter how many books you’ve read at the table, podcasts you’ve listened to while stirring away attachments, or hours you’ve logged on the kitchen floor in meditation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Trust me, I’ve tried. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Out of all the contemplative cooking methods I know (and there is always some ego involved in our methods), the one that is the most powerful isn’t a method at all; it’s a state of being: Interdependence. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">And for that you have to go out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Like any recipe, this is a delicate balance--a balance between going out with your heart and staying in with your mind. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">My mind is an unreliable narrator, at best: “I can’t go to <a href="http://www.buddhafest.org/" target="_blank">BuddhaFest</a> this year, There is so much to DO. I have an herb garden to plant, people; recipes to craft; these dishes are a stupa high and no one is helping me; I’m already helplessly behind for the summer; my butt’s too big for this caftan; just once, could someone NOT leave a light saber or a stuffed animal on my meditation seat?” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">This is just a big etceterut, which you may recognize. The one where your head says, the more I do, <i>by myself</i>, the more <i>progress</i> I will make. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">The thing with contemplative cooking is that, in the process of kitchen-floor sitting and then using everything that comes your way, you’re always seeing these places in yourself that aren’t cooked yet. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">My mind thinks it can make it go faster by turning up the heat on my practices, on my urgency, but as <a href="http://ramdass.org/" target="_blank">Ram Dass</a> reminds me, "You can only go at the rate you can go.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">I am just now coming to understand that he meant at the <i>heart rate</i> you can go.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">You see, Interdependence, the experience of being with others—or of simply allowing ourselves to be here, just as we are--throws a heart-shaped potato into our oversalty dish of suffering (an interdependence effect we will talk about in part 2 of this post, Sweet Potato Sharon Salzberg & the Galactic Galette). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">And most of our suffering is just heaping cups of salt and trouble we borrowed from all-too-willing “neighbors” <i>anyway</i>, the stories in our mind, conspiring with us to continue to suffer. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Interdependence is not really an ingredient you can add, though actually it’s always on hand somewhere in the dusty recesses of the mind-pantry. It’s more like a trace element in everything, always. It gets activated for our—and for others’--wellbeing and for the balance of all our practices (all the many flavors of those) when we allow ourselves to be present with others in a place like BuddhaFest: A Festival for Heart + Mind, which is really the first place I experienced this phenomena.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">And the experience of interdependence <i>is</i> a phenomenal addition, any way you dish your personal practice, be it Buddhist or not. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">It’s where I, person least likely to chant, first chanted with <a href="http://www.krishnadas.com/" target="_blank">Krishna Das</a>—and was only able to place the profoundly uncomfortable new feeling as <i>joy</i>,<i> with other people</i>, much later. It’s where <a href="http://www.sharonsalzberg.com/" target="_blank">Sharon Salzberg </a>got under my tomato-thin skin and split the ruby red of my heart open--AGAIN. It’s where <a href="http://www.tarabrach.com/" target="_blank">Tara Brach </a>helped me gently pull the second arrow from my own breast, retracting it with the silk threads of my own pierced Mogul’s vest. It’s where I experienced a lasting moment of stillness and complete acceptance and love in the eyes of Ram Dass (via Skype), that I have tried to get back to every day of my life since that time.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Eric Forbis and Gabriel Riera, BuddhaFest's Co-Directors, are a sweet, understated (and underrated) presence like a spare streusel topping with three rasps of nutmeg, but here is a crumb, with their characteristically humble mouth feel:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;"><a href="http://www.buddhafest.org/about/" target="_blank">"We created BuddhaFest to serve the dharma.” </a></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">And they do.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Imagine serving from this place...that can never run out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">It’s not about Buddhism, per se. It’s about<i> interconnecting</i> to your buddhanature, which is the one in-gredient we never run out of. that allows us to nourish and be nourished.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">It’s about learning to eat at home in your spiritual heart, your buddhanature, no matter where your unruly physical kitchen-mind resides. No matter how messy and unprepared it feels. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">There are film fests, and honey fests, and bacon fests, and even Don Knotts fests (it’s true; I’ve been there), but what we are celebrating Here is not some mere consumable experience. It’s not a person or a thing. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Because the Buddha within us is the world’s great, endlessly sustainable resource. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">But you have to balance Heart + Mind to see it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Everyone from Meher Baba to David Foster Wallace has observed that the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master—but that’s a dualistic kitchen staff structure at best, and it throws the brain and the gut into spasms of sixes and sevens. There really<i> is</i> something in between. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Neither simmering servant, nor scalding master, <i>the heart is this interconnected pantry of possibility.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Frankly, it’s taken me years to realize that a lot of the contents of my mind alone are just baloney, and I think that in recent years we’ve all realized just how toxic and unfilling baloney is. For me, a girl who’s been afraid of nitrates since the 3rd grade, there is a second mind-dart akin to what Tara Brach kindly calls “the second arrow”—the one we point back at ourselves after the first’s more impersonal wound. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">I have been scared of my mind my whole life (probably long before the 3rd grade discovery of nitrates), and I’ve been on some level angry at myself for being afraid; so I’ve been darting in and out of its darkness, afraid to go all the way in. </span><br />
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Which is why when, in meditation, I stumble on a fear of letting go because things might blow up, I might get up and pour, say, simmering sauce ingredients into my blender, which will surely expand and explode everywhere out the top hole of the Oster, every single time, proving my point. It’s just how it works. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">I wouldn’t call these recipes for disaster, but I might call them recipes for resistance to the way things are. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Interdependence—whether it’s sitting quietly during a film or talk together, meditating, or just getting out of the kitchen-mind and into the flow of real life, is the middle grounding, and it keeps us out of the Lonely Crowd mentality of separation. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">BuddhaFest, trust me, is no Lonely Crowd. Though I’m a fake extrovert, I have struggled with anxiety for most of my life, and it’s not always easy to feel ease in a crowd, much less in my own skin. Crowds are prime place I often feel a sense of keen separation from others, trapped inside my own skin (and my anxious mind). Past BuddhaFest presenter extraordinaire <a href="http://www.rickhanson.net/" target="_blank">Rick Hanson</a>, who knows a<i> lot </i>about brains and how they work and don’t work so well sometimes, once gave me some very useful advice when I was afraid to attend a conference (just to attend, not even to present), regarding “crowd control” of the mind: If you see yourself as a fish—busy in your own midstream of experience, as everyone else is, nothing really touches you. You can swim freely, anywhere. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Among, <i>with</i>, free. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">You can also just glide when you realize you’re all sitting in the same metta boat. (Metta, a Pali word, translates loosely to love. But it’s a loose kind of love that is the essence of pure kindness.) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Because, no matter the flavors of our practices, we're all in the same boat headed for the far shore, and there is plenty of leg room for everyone. Lucky for me, there is also a virtual galley kitchen.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Plus, you really can pull weeds and plant seeds—here, cilantro—anywhere. You can do it in a crowd. At BuddhaFest. You can do it, especially, in the places our minds believe are the smallest of impossible spaces, like those between appearances, between atoms, which are really where all the space of being really lives.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">The metta boat is headed to, and also from, points of light like BuddhaFest. A swelling all over the world now, like a great gullywasher of consciousness. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">And then your sweet husband-- just happy to be with you, at BuddhaFest or anywhere else--walks in as you start overthinking this post, and says, “You’re not a monk in a cave, Stacia. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Get in the boat and let’s go be." </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;"><a href="http://www.buddhafest.org/buddhadest-2014-schedule/" target="_blank">On my plate (and yours soon): Tara Brach and the Summer Solstice Evening tonight; Mindful Leadership; Sharon Salzberg on The Power of Generosity and Ram Dass via Skype tomorrow night. </a></span><br />
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With huge gratitude to the interdependent team at BuddhaFest!--and to myself, for getting out of my kitchen-mind and into my heart to go.Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-78485497282119297852014-06-16T12:35:00.000-04:002014-06-16T12:46:01.004-04:00Strawberry-Rhubarb Being, From Scratch-That<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">I have started to see that all cooking resources actually lie within...and you can’t source from a mind pantry that’s depleted. Language feeds and depletes me, by turns of the mixer blade, I've learned. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">There are technical differences between buckles, bettys, crisps, cobblers, and slumps—but the truth is, they’re all made of the same core star stuff, as are we. Carl Sagan said, <a href="http://youtu.be/7s664NsLeFM" target="_blank">"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">But that’s just a technicality. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Of <i>course</i> he was never talking about something as simple as pi, and I'm sure he meant to include all of the above. But being a wise and kind teacher, he didn’t want to scare us--and in the Western world, appealing to a mom and apple pie sensibility increases the likelihood that your message might be widely received, if not swallowed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Look, I can’t even figure high-altitude cooking temps, so I am not even going to attempt outer space conversions. You already know, if you've spent as much time cut off from yourself in the vacuum of alienation, that if you want to get free and become a more dimensional being, inner space is the only place to do your cooking. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">I have labored under a belief for a very long time that I have to make everything from scratch. My Depression Era ethic: "make it cheap, make it all by yourself, and do everything from what you already have; buy nothing new—and something horrible will happen if it’s not perfect, if it’s not dazzling” rears its head when I am most stressed and most egoic—usually, these coincide in singular situations of simple striving, a flavor of craving.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Mostly, it’s striving to make demons of unworthiness go away. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">The problem is that if you feed them, say, a phenomenal strawberry-rhubarb </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">buckles/betty/crisp/cobbler/slumps</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">--they always want more. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Unless you grow all of your own food, sew the cloth napkins, and smelt every napkin ring, you are hemstitching yourself not only into a corner, but into time. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">And you can starve in your own kitchen that way. It seems impossible that anybody could starve on my watch, especially on things made of brown sugar and butter star stuff, but it’s true.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">I love the page in Ram Dass’s<i> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Be-Here-Now-Ram-Dass/dp/0517543052/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1402935390&sr=8-1&keywords=be+here+now" target="_blank">Be Here Now</a></i> that says, “You and I can always starve together if we’re backstage in the Here & Now. No matter how much food we put in our bellies, it’s never going to be enough,” though it’s hard to swallow that the starving person is…me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Because when you are worriedly stirring up the future, or sifting all your presence into your past, you can never just be. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">One thing I have learned about this method, contemplative cooking, is that if you want to make anything from scratch, including your own peace of mind, you must, as Sagan advised, first invent a universe where that is possible for yourself. Where there is enough room to breathe into a more peaceful, easy, loving, and potentially wise version of yourself. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Learning to just be—in one moment, one breath, or one bite--is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Because, unlike other learned things my sort of academic, thinky personality is wired for, you don’t do just being (actually, you have to undo a lot), and, surprise, surprise, in a realization like a perpetual streusel burn on the roof of your mouth, “it" never does get done. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">For me to really learn to cook with what I have in my heart, I have got to get out of my head. And that means tweaking the language, so it is one that I can really digest (this is the perk of my wordsmithy mind). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">So, when I say scratch, I am starting to reframe it as “scratch-that” in my head. As in, scratch those old story lines. Scratch a past that tells you you have to do everything yourself, the one where something terrible will happen if it’s not absolutely perfect. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;"><i>Scratch whatever it is that no longer serves you. Be willing to step outside the grains of sugar, salt, and time.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">I am scratch that is. Try that on for a mantra, if you’re feeling rhubarb-pert and plucky. If you’re feeling brave.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">If you’re here, you must be because well-being is a warrior’s path, of which this method of contemplative cooking is a flavor, but whatever yours happens to be is perfect.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">And maybe it changes, because everything does. Depending on what kind of recipe trip I’m on right then, I could need to see where I am and what I’m making of it as a buckle, a slump, a cobbler, or a betty of a crisp trip.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">When I realize this, that it’s all okay, wherever I am, I’m a buckle—but not one cinching together a false understanding of anything, one that is loosening it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Of course, you can just skip the whole problem of what to call it and experience it. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">As Grandpa Fred famously remarked of Long Duck Dong’s perplexity, marveling over his first quiche in <i>Sixteen Candles</i>: “You don’t spell it son, you eat it.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">And maybe that's how you get out of the spell of unworthiness, too. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Just call it a be-ing. A being with whatever ingredients arise out of your own kitchen-mind.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">This weekend was Father’s Day, and I had to loosen my expectations, as those holidays often go. You can’t be in all places at once, especially you’re still working on being Here for one breath. My still newish father-in-law runs 100-mile races and taught me about chia seeds before they were cool. He’s sequoia quiet (as is the darling, be-ing husband)—but I know that my cooking speaks to him and that he is hugely grateful. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">This was a good, stellar-but-not-showy recipe on a quiet day, just the three of us eating up being.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Strawberry-Rhubarb Be-ing (adapted from Ina Garten)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">4 cups fresh rhubarb, 1-inch diced (4-5 stalks)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">4 cups fresh strawberries, hulled and halved</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">1 1/4 cups turbinado sugar</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">1 1/2 teaspoons grated orange zest (I used more)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">1/2 tablespoon xanthan gum (because you are out of cornstarch and madly Googling a replacement)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">1/2 cup freshly squeezed orange juice (which you squeeze with your bare blistered hands, realizing you need to just buy a juicer)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">1 cup all-purpose flour</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">1/2 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">1/2 teaspoon pink himalayan salt</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">1 cup quick-cooking (not instant) steel cut oats (I used Bob's)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) cold butter, diced</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">1 T ground vanilla bean (or use extract)</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Vanilla ice cream and fresh whipped cream, for serving</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F, 340, if using a dark pan.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Fruit part: In a big bowl, t.oss the rhubarb, strawberries, 3/4 cup of the granulated sugar & the orange zest together. Dissolve the xanthan gum in the orange juice; fold into the fruit. Pour the mixture into an 9x9-inch baking dish (or use 8x11) and place it on cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px;">Topping: in the bowl of a stand mixer (use paddle attachment, combine the flour, the remaining 1/2 cup granulated sugar, the brown sugar, salt and oatmeal. Add the ground vanilla. With the mixer on low speed, add the butter and mix until the dry ingredients are moist and the mixture is in crumbles. Sprinkle the topping over the fruit, covering it completely, and bake for 1 hour, until the fruit is bubbling and the topping is golden brown. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: x-small;">Eat--and Be a good digester. </span>Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-67143719973203021122014-03-15T13:19:00.000-04:002014-03-18T07:59:49.646-04:00Right Speech: See No Self-Harm, Hear No Self-Harm, Speak No Self-Harm (The Tootsie Roll Pop & 40 Licks)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="clear: left; float: left; font-family: inherit; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px;">See No Self-Harm, Hear No Self-Harm, Speak No Self-Harm. You may be able to see and hear, pretty clearly, that this is just another version of <a href="http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/sacca/sacca4/samma-vaca/" target="_blank">Right Speech</a>,</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px;"> wisely turned inward.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 15px;">As a child of the 70s, I want to point out that, in addition to Right Speech, this ceramic image is merely another version of the Tootsie Pop Owl. And it too carries a message for me; those Tootsie Roll Pops are, notoriously, an inside job. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-96rzZuUy8Lg/UySIvyHJFzI/AAAAAAAAB8E/0bbCVAnGbpY/s1600/howmanylicks.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-96rzZuUy8Lg/UySIvyHJFzI/AAAAAAAAB8E/0bbCVAnGbpY/s1600/howmanylicks.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px;">They never seem to go away, those stylized owls--they never will. Why? Because as sound carriers of a particular good message, they work. And choosing the Charm pop over the Harm pop </span><i style="font-family: inherit; font-size: 15px;">is a wise factor in cultivating happiness for yourself and for others. </i><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">You can think of Right Speech as a sweet nobility, at your fingertips and lips. It’s choosing, moment by moment, to use a sweet tongue over an acrid one because it’s just less harmful for us all. Our Speech, even in less-obvious ways, like the Prattle and Hum of idle chatter or gossip (a good litmus test I use with myself is, “Um, is this a conversation you would have with Bono, Stacia?”), can turn and stick us.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px;">Like the Owl, "How many licks?” was the question for me then, as a 70s kid, and it’s the question for me now, as an adult in the new Milleni-yum.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">How many licks will I take?--not just from the sticks and stones of the external world (almost none of which isn't in my control), but what about the sodden, cardboard-tasting and red-stained stick I <i>turn back on myself</i> with an impaling gesture?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">The Buddha called this the second dart; Tara Brach (unintentional confectionary surname noted) calls it the second arrow, and here, it’s going to be called the second stick. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 15px;">The second stick is the one you wield yourself, at yourself, <i>on top of </i>the other damage: <i>zzzzzzwing!</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">It comes in all kinds of insidious flavors: </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">maybe I punish myself for both needing and possibly somewhat (<i>gasp!</i>) enjoying a sugar rush; she, who’s trying to eat clean. Maybe I beat myself up for ordering take-out four nights in a row for my family during those weeks when I have 64 papers to grade. Maybe I notice that my best flare jeans are tight and then I eat a despair cake, finished off with a Diet Dr. Pepper (I never drink soda anymore), followed by a self-stick and stoning. Get the idea?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">Look, the Tootsie Pop Owl couldn’t make it past three licks before trying to get to the center—and neither can I. I don’t <i>want </i>to lick all around the artificially-flavored mulberry bush to get there, never have. I want to get to that sweet, chewy, flavor-condensed center its with implied inner peace. I also want to get over my self-harm (insert: self-starvation, self-poison, self-sabotage—whatever your stickiness), and I want it in three licks or less. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">Pretty much as fast as possible. Pretty much NOW.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"><i>1...2...3…Crrrrrunch!!!</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"><i>Now.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">Like grated carrot in a green salads, these things crop up into adult life and remind me of my unwise youth in a way that I can now use wisely. As<i> fuel.</i> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">Sugar is a darn fine fuel—don’t forget. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">My grandparents Viola and Boris had traveled the world, and I remember being frightened and transfixed by many of their artifacts, including a Japanese statue depicted the Three Wise Monkeys and this principle: See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">As grateful as I am for the artifacts I grew up with, it wasn’t until I swapped out the word “Evil” for “self-harm” that I became<i> integrate</i>-ful:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">It is said that the well-spoken word can only be the </span><span style="background-color: #fffeff; color: #101010; font-size: 14px;">one <i>that would not torment oneself</i> nor harm others. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">As a methods maven, I can tell you that I can’t digest judgment words like “Evil” anymore. Something happens around 40 Licks. Yet there is is no judgment in a) what works and b) what is true. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">It’s true that I know a lot of self-harming recipes that all have the same ingredient—<i>Speech.</i> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"></span><br /><span style="font-size: 15px;"><i>And it's also true</i> that even an old cog-in-the-wheel can learn new licks. And I am. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">And, I am (savor the power of the "And").</span>
<span style="font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">Perhaps you’re near 40 Licks yourself (either literally or metaphorically). We expect we must take our licks as we age—but we rarely think that we can be in control of the gentleness and the intention of the licking. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">That intention, conscious or not, is to reveal our true, sweet selves.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">I know this is true from my very center.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">The minute you stop breaking your teeth trying to get to your own goodness, the world will do nothing less than conspire to show you its sweet, true nature, which is to lick for you and with you (trust me, much more gently than you’d do it alone).</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">Because consciousness isn’t a BIG <i>crrrrunch! </i>It’s more of a slow reveal. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">The good news is that you get to do a lot of taste-testing of your own goodness, as you go.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">And you will use this taste of your own sweetness, which is like coming home, to realize that suddenly, one day, you can identify the same sweetness in everybody else.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">And that really is the mother of all sweet spots.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">And then you can toss (but recycle) the stick for other purposes. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">I’m giving the owl totem to my sister, Kara, as a belated housewarming gift. She’s starting a new, self-nourishing life <i>and </i>about to turn 40. She’s in the beautification industry (and um, there’s definitely a reason they call it “40 lashes”). </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">Surely there is more than a 3-lick statute of limitations on such a thing, the wisdom of beautification from the inside, out. Of investigating what's under our wrappers. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">This is how we are meant to live, by the way, like the owls: nested on each other’s shoulders, tandem-shoring up each other’s forgetting so that we can reach ever <i>up </i>as we reach in for the natural sweet spot. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 15px;">Like a rainbow assortment of sweet and resilient gems, stacked skyward.</span></span>
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 15px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">For you, my beautiful sister (imagine Billy Crystal gently holding a Tootsie Roll Pop for you, Meg Ryan): "And I'm going to be 40!" </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Someday. In ten years. And Now.</span></span>Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-54322410459450564402014-02-28T13:35:00.000-05:002014-03-01T13:17:23.804-05:00Shun-yata: The Knife Edge (& Growth Edge) of Emptiness--& Butternut Squash.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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With great respect, I'm going to say that if you want to fully understand the Buddhist concept of Shunyata, or <i>emptiness</i>, you can just keep sitting there*. Because, even though words like <i>void</i> and <i>thusness</i> go down fine for me, I don't completely get it either. I get it just enough to be dangerous, which is exactly how it is with all cooking--and with all practices.<br />
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Because the truth is, all you need in the contemplative kitchen is a <i>working</i> knowledge of any cooking concept--and the sincerity to Be with it.<br />
Add a pure love for "it" and the ever-expanding sense of spaciousness that comes from working with what you <i>know</i> in your heart will ultimately feed yourself and others, and you can <i>almost</i> stop obsessively Googling Buddhist-culinary-neuroscientific-Sanskrit terms that might overlap and come in handy someday in your practice.<br />
<br />
Because we all have to come to terms with the terms: knowledge is not the same as wisdom, and recipes are just worn & spattered cue cards.<br />
<br />
Wisdom, I am learning, is that which comes from all of your ahas and insights--from the paying attention and the Being Here that the cards could only cue you for. And it seems to come most from the times you almost<i> </i>cut off your finger along with the parsnips, precisely because you <i>weren't</i> paying attention.<br />
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Wisdom is the cut-to-the-chase (and possibly the ER) scene: a realization like, say, that more than just skin-deep-down, you actually reaaaaally believed it was going to be possible to micro minutiae multi-task the moments of your life using pure intellect (no matter <i>what </i>your hero Daniel Goleman has warned you for 20 years, most recently in his masterwork <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Focus-Hidden-Excellence-Daniel-Goleman/dp/0062114867/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1393611548&sr=1-1&keywords=daniel+goleman+focus" target="_blank">Focus</a></i>).<br />
<br />
You can't cut through a butternut squash with a butter knife, no matter <i>what</i> the terms "seem" to have in common.<br />
<br />
Knowledge is the tool that slices through your illusion that, when it comes to love and to learning to eat at home in your heart, there is ever going to be anything substantive than the language of pure utility,<br />
AND<br />
Wisdom is understanding that you are everything on either side of the cut--including the blade.<br />
You'll need a utility knife to help you get there, I know. <i>We all need help </i>cutting to the "AND."<br />
<br />
To cut this in smaller bites for myself, I think on Shun-yata as the knife-edge of emptiness implied by the knife itself. One-pointedness, then, is this incredibly precise tool that can help wake us up so we can skillfully (not to mention, safely) understand whatever form we're slicing through: what it is <i>AND</i> what it's not. But above all, it's a tool whereby we see just what's actually there on the cutting board, no more, no less.<br />
<br />
If "one-pointedness" doesn't work for you, throw whatever you have into the stock-pot definition: mindfulness, focus, attention, awareness. Being focused on the body and on psychological and emotional digestion--and having been numb & found being in my skin impossible for many years--I'm using the word "sensibility" a lot these days to describe my fledgling ability to bring full sensory attention to the actual <i>beingness</i> of being a human being.<br />
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It's commonly understood among cooks that a dull blade is much more dangerous to you than a sharp one. The reason is that a honed blade doesn't meet with resistance--and as we know, it's the reactivity of resistance to any form that will stick you, every time.<br />
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That being said, if you were here in this tiny farmhouse kitchen, where cats who believe themselves to be jaguars, spirited children in search of the next experiment, and adoring, well-meaning but long-limbed husbands are often under foot, cutting board, & meditation cushion, while I'm working to cut through the thick rind of one type of this or that gourd (so I can get out of the real one, my thinky head), you <i>might </i>be bracing against the image of me with a brand new Shun knife, the slicing sound of which is famous in cooking circles for its fabled Samurai-stealth sibilance:<i> sshhhhhun!</i> You <i>might</i> wonder how it is that Stacia, who regularly (yeah, fairly regularly) drops cast iron on herself, scalds tea kettles beyond recognition, and slips on literal & figurative banana peels as she navigates the art of becoming, could ever <i>think</i> about using such a famously dangerous blade.<br />
<br />
The answer is this: I'm not busy (over)thinking about using it when I'm using it. Or worrying that it's too big a tool for my britches. I'm just using it.<br />
Happily, that is the maven to my madness.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LPUqPIjsqvc/UxDQ-7r-xyI/AAAAAAAAB2k/W_TmFptlwFw/s1600/grapefruit_samaraisquash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LPUqPIjsqvc/UxDQ-7r-xyI/AAAAAAAAB2k/W_TmFptlwFw/s1600/grapefruit_samaraisquash.jpg" height="320" width="313" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">P.S.: You can also scoop seeds & pierce the flesh of squash with a<br />
lowly, low-tech & less aggressive grapefruit spoon. Grapefruit spoons<br />
were a great tool of my grandmother Viola's.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
You see, although I have less "figured out" than I had last year at this time, I have finally honed in on something. In his 1709 poem "An Essay on Criticism," Alexander Pope observed that "A little learning is a dangerous thing"--and so it is with honing. And with honing learning.<br />
The Growth Edge (I love this term, use it often) is this magical place that is well past cook-in-your-sleep comfort food territory, and just <i>before</i> the immobilizing no-clue terror of apocalypse without can openers and/or molecular gastronomy.<br />
The Growth Edge is plainly discomfortable--a healthy discomfort that is highly underserrated.<br />
<br />
I can tell you from teaching and learning to feed everyone from infants to Kindergarteners to college students to myself at 40, that this liminal space--between rigidity and abyss, form and formless, know and no-know--is the prime cut. Because it's the only edge on which we both learn to dance and dance<i> at the same time</i>. <br />
<br />
When the Growth Edge is sharp, everything on either side falls away cleanly--there's nothing there any more.<br />
In fact, the only danger is that this Shunyata might cut so deeply <i>you might not even feel it. </i>Like<i> </i>cutting through the air, through the ether, through illusion--and like cutting through nothing at all.<br />
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Hone Sweet Hone, gentle readers.<br />
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*However, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche gave a typical rustically delicious and divinely digestible treatment of this in <i><a href="http://www.shambhalamedia.org/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=BVE185" target="_blank">Glimpses of Shunyata</a></i><br />
<br />Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-42633339709259460992013-10-04T18:38:00.002-04:002013-11-23T08:33:58.078-05:00Astral Weeks & Lemon Pound Cake: The Tractor Beam of Love's Resonance<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Love is a tendril of a cartoon smell that wafts out and lifts you (or yanks you) up, like a golden-white tendril of the scent of the lemon pound cake, currently baking in real time here in the peacefoodlove kitchen, in Connor's honor. Just because the boy loves lemon pound cakes. You've never seen the look of gratitude a single crumb of golden lovingkindness can elicit, until you've seen a face like that, one that says, "You made that for <i>me</i>?" (</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">and he's 15, so wonder is no mean feat). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Maybe you cook for people, and you know.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">My ampersand-children (step isn't the right word) are coming, and I have a tendency to bake and clean myself into perfectionistic corners in anticipation of these infrequent visits.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">In fact, it's been Astral Weeks since they've been here. </span><br />
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<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/4ech6pZoBJ4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">I could write you 108 posts about this Van Morrison album. It's <i>that</i> beloved and it stretches across every experience I have had, in some way or another, since I was 20 years old, when I first heard and wore out the CD. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Periodically, still, I pull it back to me--or me to it--when I need it. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Love is a tractor beam of mutual resonance like that.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">I must have needed it, because I was running around fiendishly vacuuming after putting in a lemon pound cake, getting pretty caught up in getting things "perfectly hospitable"--my biggest trap when I'm anxious about how things will go. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Unfortunately, the very same methods you use to get you closer can be used to try to squirm away. Even your best methods can stick you!--I don't care how deeply you butter and flour the form. . .er, pan.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">All of a sudden--maybe I was caught by the light or the cord or the way the smell of a cake unfolds and walks gently across the floorboards to you in a farmhouse--I happened to turn around and look behind me, and see the cord, which had somehow twisted (or untwisted) itself into a perfect heart.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">The cord, I tell you!</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">And don't even get me started on good-emptiness (which isn't a vacuum) and making space.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Some day, these m</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">ettā</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">phors will stop surprising me--maybe. I don't think they'll stop spring up--or back, like a cake that's done.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">And what came into my head were these lines from Astral Weeks, which apparently I have been mis-singing along with, quite ardently, for over 20 years, but only just now understand:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><i>With your love behind you / and your eyes before you / there you go / takin' good care of your boy</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">I pretty much dissolved, just the way the tiniest dram of lemon juice will completely liquify powdered sugar and make icing. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">I'm pretty sure that all appliances and songs leave love notes for us to decode, but we're usually charging on ahead.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">And this one said: taking care of your love isn't a zoom ahead with a Dyson and a perfect pound cake-type activity. It's a stop right here and now and here it is, the Now, iced in sweetly like being between two pieces of warm pound cake.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">So I was pulled in here to the kitchen to try to recount it for you (okay quickly, with T-50 till arrival).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><i>Could you find me?</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Love will find you. It doesn't matter what you do or how hard you do it. You can't clean your way out of it, and I can tell you that you can try to eat the evidence of your own hunger for it, only to find<i> another</i> tender crumb you missed, on the floor of your heart.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">You can do all your methods to get closer, or you can do them all to try to get away, and end up, right back around the plate. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><i>In silence easy / To be born again. </i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Okay, not so much with the silence around here, but if you weren't born again, you couldn't hear the screaming coming from mudroom, Otto with gritty eyes from the sandbox, begging for the kind of help only you can give. Ava, crying over accidentally cutting a caterpillar in half while pruning the tomatoes.You couldn't see--or serve--the m</span><span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">ettā</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">phor.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived” Helen Keller</span></span><br />
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<br /></div>Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-16705125610613303472013-08-16T11:58:00.001-04:002013-08-16T12:44:01.505-04:00Breakfast Dishes Now with Boba Fett & Ram Dass: "Breackage" or Bounty?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">We keep the natural guidance of characters close, and this morning, Boba Fett landed in the blackberries. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">These are probably the last of the "backberries"--those from the tree line at the edge of the back field, which mysteriously keep bearing in August.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Today after our breakfast and (I feel cleverly deemed) "<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6fm2bqS0uk" target="_blank">A.M. That Is</a>" meeting, everyone skipped out the door and left me with the breakfast wreckage--the "breackage."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">They left to swing, chase after butterflies, and check on progress at the newly fashioned "Rabbing" station. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">To enjoy the last bit of summer, like egg quickly drying on a plate.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Explained to me during the materials request as "crabbing but with rabbits," (there's no intention to trap them), this experiment is kitchen string dangling mini carrots at various heights from tree limbs at the edge of the back field. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">The Rabbers are tied to the tree limbs with slip knots (don't ask me where they learned to tie slip knots, also called buntlines or slipped rolling hitches).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Depending on the tightness of the resulting knot (since these tighten under load), we may get information about the weight of the animal that received the meal.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">I think this line of thinking is genius, by the way. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Also, it's pretty much all we have to gauge life's phenomenon<i>, </i>w</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">hich we usually try to do</span><i style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"> after</i><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"> it's passed, since we mostly miss the now of what's happening:</span><br />
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<i style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; text-align: center;">How tight are the knots now that it's over? How bad is the tension?</i><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><i>Just how big were the bites taken out?</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">However, these are only clues to the beast of burden that <i>was</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">The beast of burden that is is Now isn't actually a burden.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">I love that there's no real intention to their Rabbing method, but to cast it out there and see what happens. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">They're not getting anything out of it--except to watch time mysteriously change a thing they set in motion, but is actually no longer in their hands. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">And, hopefully, to know the joy of feeding some being that wasn't asking to be fed, but surely needs and may appreciate the nourishment a from a shaded tree line we simply cannot see.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">This is a lot like parenting. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">A lot like loving anyone, child, pet, self--human or…burdensome beast. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">The day-to-dayness of loving people and feeding them sometimes feels more feat than f</span><span style="font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">ête</span><span style="font-size: 15px;"> (or even Fett).</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Even on the most perfect of sun-dappled, dangling days, I get myself trapped in the farmhouse kitchen--where I most love to be, but </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">where there is so little space. A</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">s my office, yoga studio, and the whole family's HQ, it all needs to be cleaned up and set in order before moving on to the next thing. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">An endless cycle of scraping, scrubbing, washing, drying.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">These are the things we do to remove the egg-yolk scrim, to unburden our plates so we can be closer to love, to become less "content-laden," as Ram Dass, who never fails to astonish me, says in his newest wonderful book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Polishing-Mirror-Live-Spiritual-Heart/dp/1604079673" target="_blank">Polishing the Mirror</a></i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">We do it over and over, so we can both hold and offer more.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Drying the dishes, polishing the mirror--these are the same. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">The heart is a shining plate.</span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-y-Z_a5WVNho/Ug5Wk0RLIFI/AAAAAAAAByQ/zTKSW3QlM1I/s1600/cosmosbees.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-y-Z_a5WVNho/Ug5Wk0RLIFI/AAAAAAAAByQ/zTKSW3QlM1I/s320/cosmosbees.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">So, the research question is, do I stay inside and watch through the dulling screen of the door, feel "left" all alone to sit in the "breakage," convinced of all I have to <i>do</i> today?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Or do I step out into the All is well Now, into the flourishing cosmos, which has become a happy harbinger of bees?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"> The milkweed is full of monarchs. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">And it's perfect swinging-toward-the-good weather (thanks, <a href="http://www.rickhanson.net/" target="_blank">Rick Hanson</a>, for this double-take on your eternal advice to swing for the fences).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">I think Boba-fett gets kind of a bad rap, by the way. Like Darth Vader, it's just too obvious to completely disdain him (and you know I fear being obvious).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">We are<i> all</i> after the bounty, whatever we perceive that to be. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Maybe we're <i>hired on</i> for that job by the Dark Side of ourselves, but the innate goodness of ourselves and our shining, empty plate, that is the bounty.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Dishes will hunt you. Mess will hunt you. Clutter will hunt you. The end of summer and the cold winter ahead (okay, anything under 70 degrees) will hunt you. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">This means, though, <i>you</i> are the real bounty.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">T.S. Eliot recommended that we <i>do</i> dare to eat the peach, and I think we should eat up all bounty as it comes. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">It simply helps us berr the weightless weight of imagined fears of the future. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Highly recommended readings:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><a href="http://poetry.rapgenius.com/Ts-eliot-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock-lyrics#note-50204" target="_blank">"The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"</a> by T.S. Eliot</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.199999809265137px;"><i><a href="http://www.ramdass.org/polishing-the-mirror-release/" target="_blank">Polishing the Mirror</a> </i>by Ram Dass with Rameshwar Das </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-26913626232395571242013-08-12T13:58:00.001-04:002014-03-01T13:24:44.008-05:00Mnemosynemon Rolls OR: Percy Jackson & The Sea of Monstrous Self-Doubt<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Two weeks from today, school starts back up for all of us, and we've only done a fraction of the hopeful, absurdly noble things planned for mythical summers. Here is only one thing on that list, writ in august, disappearing ink:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">"Explore Greek Mythology as a family this summer. </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">AFTER reading Rick Riordan's second Percy Jackson novel, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Monsters-Percy-Jackson-Olympians-Book/dp/1423103343/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1376320160&sr=8-1&keywords=a+sea+of+monsters" target="_blank">Sea of Monsters</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">, and BEFORE the movie comes out in August, enlist the kids to make a Papier Mâché Medusa head light fixture cover or chandelier, with intrinsically glowing eyes and wafting, organically animatronic snakes. See sketches."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">FAIL.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Okay. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Only a partial fail, though.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Because </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">Papier Mâché</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;"> is French for "chewed paper," and </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">I can see the way that even with more self-compassion, I still get spit-wadded up with everything I thought up, but somehow cannot execute because of time.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">And, you know, mortality.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">I get Cyclops-vision, you see, with creative plans: I train one big eye on the parts I didn't do (no matter how small), and completely miss the rest--all the good stuff in the periphery.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">And one thing I'm learning is that there's a pretty big field of vision outside the negative--Titanic, in fact.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">I didn't finish<i> Sea of Monsters</i> in time, but Ava chewed right through it, since she carries 4 books (one from each current series) around everywhere--but it didn't keep her from beaming, squealing in delight, and leaning over to whisper <i>I love you</i> through the whole movie, when all of us went to see it over the weekend. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Sometimes, it's only important to have a beautiful, mythic<i> vision</i> of the structure for your days--which can feel long, and yet somehow nothing close to Olympic--whether or not they actually turn out that way.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">To put things in perspective, I recommend National Geographic's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Treasury-Greek-Mythology-Goddesses-Monsters/dp/1426308442" target="_blank">Treasure of Greek Mythology</a>.</i> Its luminous illustrations and radiant storytelling make it a perfect breakfast or lunchtime (or while in the Charybdis-jaws of that whirlpool: "getting-breakfast-cleaned-up-just-as-lunch-is-on-the-table") read. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">You too can speak in a sibilant hiss, acting out Medusa over a plate of spaghetti, and spear imaginary foes with a three-tined fork--I mean, <i>trident.</i> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">You need a book like this. </span></span>We all do.<br />
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B<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">ecause just feeding people and loving them, meal after meal and day after day--especially on endless, steam-rainy days when you just want to Ju-ly down and cry because you're not getting anything "real" <i>done</i>, like painting the walls or attending to your own writing, and it's all Percy Jackson & The Sea of Monstrous Self-Doubt anyway--</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">IS<i> heroic</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Yesterday at breakfast, we played "Celebrity Greek God You Most Resemble."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Ava: Mom, if you were a god or goddess, I believe you'd be "A-pro-fight." Y</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">ou know, the goddess of beauty and love? </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Me: Aphrodite?</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Ava: Sorry, I don't know how to pronounce it, but it's true.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><i>Awwwww, </i>I think (for almost 3 seconds)<i>: She sees me that way! As a goddess of beauty! And she's almost 10! </i>[Insert sickening fear and resistance to change] <i>How long can this last?...</i></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic;">Now wait a minute, why doesn't she see me as Athena? I want to be wisdom, not beauty. Isn't that what we're after around here?<b><u> Doesn't she think I'm smart?</u></b></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">But Athena is not the goddess of needing to be told she's smarter than everyone else, because she's not so sure. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">She's the goddess of wisdom--which is the really the knowledge of truth, or true nature of things, applied. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Wisdom is knowledge put to good use. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Me: Who do you want to be?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Ava: Athena. Naturally.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">THUD.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">It turns out this is an invaluable exercise. Keeping Greek myths handy, so you can stop and consider with whom you most identify. Who you might turn out to be, while you eat. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />Because Aphrodite is the goddess of Love.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Which is, said another way, the knowledge of beauty (and ugliness), put to good use.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Nowhere do you see it all more clearly, than reflected in your own plate.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">The great dancer Isadora Duncan once said: "Before I was born my mother was in great agony of spirit and in a tragic situation. She could take no food except iced oysters and champagne. If people ask me when I began to dance, I reply, 'in my mother's womb, probably as a result of the oysters and champagne - the food of Aphrodite.'"</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Well, I was</span><i style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"> far </i><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">too afraid of all I'd read-henned, in popular mothering magazines, doctor's offices, and the Internet to go anywhere </span><i style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">near</i><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"> shellfish or champagne (though I struggled with my drinking before and after both pregnancies), but you get the idea here:</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Whatever the food of beauty and love is, it makes us leap and spin. It gives us the the wings--and horns, and Achilles' heels--we're each born with. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">And that sensibility passes through, umbilically. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Our bodies and minds are corded to our parents' issues and identities--for better and for worse--you can blood bank on it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Science currently suggests that not only can we pass on our neuroses and mutated genes, we can pass along our neuroplastic-fantastic ability to embrace concepts like goodness, wellness, and heroism, as well.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 15.199999809265137px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">We are all hyperlinked by the motherlode of our sensibilities, a</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">nd quite frankly, we're <i>all </i>on a collective quest here, using our senses to help classify ourselves. To see and more importantly, </span><i style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">feel</i><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">, ourselves fitting into the structure.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Down in our bones we know this, and yet it feels disturbing and "discomfortable" (as Otto says) to view ourselves as heroic--at least to use the term out loud--or as something like an epic container for a concept like love.</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">I deal with this daily, like a multivitamin.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Actually, with my tendencies to clinging to my wordplay and to my past, the goddess I would have identified myself with (without Ava's reframe) is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemosyne" target="_blank">Mnemosyne</a></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">, guardian of memory. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">It's funny no one remembers her--except maybe by her other name, "Hey, Nine Muses' Mom."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">A Mnemonic device is any learning strategy that manipulates information to help you remember--which is all mindfulness is (they're often auditory--a classic example from my childhood is Potsie's <a href="http://youtu.be/gIXcWE0bTwY" target="_blank">"Pumps Your Blood" </a>song, from <i>Happy Days</i>), and I'</span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">ve always thought it funny, as a teacher, that a chief obstacle to students's <i>using</i> mnemonic devices </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">is that they just read about them in books about how to learn, often without guidance.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Then, because they are naturally disinclined to understand words they can't pronounce (much less attempt to use them or their more ineffable concepts), they suffer. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">You can only use skillfully what you first understand.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">I find it fascinating that Ava, at 9, will keep at it--even when she risks being wrong, or misunderstood (two things I never like to be). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Once, she told a platinum waitress that the pie, not made in-house, was okay, but just "blonde."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">She'd read, understood, and never said the word<i> bland</i> out loud before. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">She was just making her best guess bringing it into the world.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Which is all parenting is. Which is all creativity is. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Which is all <i>any </i>of us is doing, at any given moment, trying to understand and be understood.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">For some reason when you're 7 or 42, it's fun (though incorrect) to pronounce "cinnamon" as cinn-ee-mon (it makes you feel like a genie bursting out of a spice bottle, which is another set of stories). It's okay to be deliberately incorrect if it helps you remember something else correctly, I think: </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><i><b>Mnemosyne</b></i>: If I say it this way, out loud: "Nem-o-cinneemon Rolls," and then hand you one, all covered with sweet, homemade icing, I can guarantee that you will get it--and never pronounce it incorrectly again. And you will no longer be afraid of that particular possibility for failure--if failure is not knowing how.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">But you may end up asking for cinneemon rolls:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cZeb9KbdnYw/UgkgG1p9DTI/AAAAAAAABw0/QSOGQyoHPzk/s1600/avaicing.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cZeb9KbdnYw/UgkgG1p9DTI/AAAAAAAABw0/QSOGQyoHPzk/s320/avaicing.JPG" height="320" width="240" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">"Please make the cinnamon rolls," they say on the weekends. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">"I'll make the icing," Ava says.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">"Do you know how?" I say.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">"How hard had could it be if you just show me? I already know what's in it: it's just confectioner's sugar and a little water with some vanilla extract--I looked it up. But <i>I'm</i> going to add cinnamon."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Probably Mnemosynneemon.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">If you want to make sense of things you don't understand, you need to allow for the fact that you don't know how, and that you might be wrong. Also (the crux of the learning curve), that you might<i> never</i> know.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">You need to be able to let down to be okay with that. You need someone you trust, holding the possibility of all the miscommunication & mishap warm and fragrant for you on a plate, nourishing you into trying.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Now why is it that I can invite some other confused, hungry soul to sit at my table, and patiently offer (and re-offer, if necessary) the plate of my own mnemosynnamon-scented goodness, yet I cannot always eat my own words?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Because, although both sides of the plate may be the same, they don't always look the same (and they definitely don't<i> feel </i>the same).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Maybe I am neither my beauty nor my clinging, nor the words themselves, but a pantheon of possibilities, on any given day.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Maybe "She"--that mythical Other or Self in the Third Person--is simply my mnemesis. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">I've always loved a line from </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15.199999809265137px;">Pema Chodron: </span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">"Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better, it’s about befriending who we are."</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Worldly life, then, is making friends with the myth (the many myths). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">Heroic friendship with oneself.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px;">[licks fingers]</span>Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-67773295433410087852013-08-05T11:12:00.001-04:002013-08-05T11:23:36.269-04:00Lovin' Spoonful: Do You Believe In Magic Touching Science on Your Plate?<div class="p1">
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A lot of people can't stomach the word "magic"--especially not anywhere on the plate touching the word "science."</div>
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<br /></div>
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I don't have any trouble palating both; I believe there is only one good word--and it's love--it only gets parsleyed and parsed different ways on the plate.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I'm not a picky eater, but I am persnickety with my words, and as an English teacher, a mom, a wife, and most of all as a human being, I try to take care to incorporate them carefully into my communications. Because our most cherished recipes are nothing more than highly personalized forms of communication.</div>
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Recipes that are desperately seeking to incorporate and ultimately plate this one ingredient: love.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Even though, as child of the 70's, my experience with this song is directly related The Shaun Cassidy version, "Do You Believe in Magic?" was written by John Sebastian & released by The Lovin' Spoonful in 1965, and it's been adored and fought over since its genesis.</div>
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Just like love.</div>
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Magic? Can that be real? TOO hokey. </div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eaqRwFyoGgQ" width="420"></iframe>
<br />
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<br /></div>
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I suggest you play this video immediately.<br />
<br /></div>
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There is an eerie cast of <i>Big Bang Theory</i> thing going on here (you'll immediately recognize Howard Wolowitz, on the left). </div>
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Magic's old, and so is this archetype: the scientist with the evolving understanding of his less-than-secret heart of liquid gold. </div>
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<br /></div>
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My goal isn't to convince you that magic is real. It's only to convince you to listen again with fresh ears and have a look at the lyrics (which follow), which are relevant as ever today, because this song is gold. </div>
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That's the alchemy of music. I don't have to convince you, I only have to press play--and if the music is groovy, you'll feel it. It'll make you happy in your body, a somatic belief that no one can convince you of, give you scientific proof for--<i>or </i>take away from you.<br />
And ultimately, yes, that may free your soul.</div>
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<br /></div>
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You want to believe. I can feel it.<br />
<i>Ah so.</i><br />
<i><br /></i></div>
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It's the same uncomfortable, save Tinkerbell-beseeching moment in<i> Peter Pan </i>or in a meditation hall, when people are inclined to open their eyes and start looking around to see if anyone<i> else </i>believes, too, before they jump (or stay sitting). </div>
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And it's okay.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I had no intention of writing this post this morning. But I stumbled across this song when I was working on something else--and I will tell you it spun me from a state of disbelief in myself (and my own goodness) I've had going for the past 24 hours into a state of belief again.<br />
<br />
I needed to see:<br />
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"How the magic's in the music and the music's in me."<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
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So, yes. I believe in magic, and the power of a spoonful of sugar to make the goodness stay down.</div>
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<br /></div>
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PS: The label "Do You Believe in Magic?" was recorded on (or within) was Kama Sutra records. </div>
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<br /></div>
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<u>"Do You Believe in Magic" (John Sebastian)</u></div>
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<br /></div>
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Do you believe in magic in a young girl's heart</div>
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How the music can free her, whenever it starts</div>
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And it's magic, if the music is groovy</div>
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It makes you feel happy like an old-time movie</div>
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I'll tell you about the magic, and it'll free your soul</div>
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But it's like trying to tell a stranger 'bout rock and roll</div>
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<br /></div>
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If you believe in magic don't bother to choose</div>
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If it's jug band music or rhythm and blues</div>
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Just go and listen it'll start with a smile</div>
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It won't wipe off your face no matter how hard you try</div>
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Your feet start tapping and you can't seem to find</div>
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How you got there, so just blow your mind</div>
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<br /></div>
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If you believe in magic, come along with me</div>
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We'll dance until morning 'til there's just you and me</div>
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And maybe, if the music is right</div>
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I'll meet you tomorrow, sort of late at night</div>
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And we'll go dancing, baby, then you'll see</div>
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How the magic's in the music and the music's in me</div>
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<br /></div>
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Yeah, do you believe in magic</div>
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Yeah, believe in the magic of a young girl's soul</div>
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Believe in the magic of rock and roll</div>
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Believe in the magic that can set you free</div>
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Ohh, talking 'bout magic</div>
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<br /></div>
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Do you believe like I believe Do you believe in magic</div>
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Do you believe like I believe Do you believe, believer</div>
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Do you believe like I believe Do you believe in magic</div>
<br />
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[Fade]</div>
Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-53061355646804309592013-07-30T12:39:00.000-04:002013-07-30T18:09:17.217-04:00All Is Well in the Cosmos: Pulling Weeds & Planting Seeds with Julian of Norwich<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KtFcnLKimHo/Uffq0Lv1UzI/AAAAAAAABus/d9CcbhFjPKc/s1600/Evernote+Camera+Roll+20130730+121338.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KtFcnLKimHo/Uffq0Lv1UzI/AAAAAAAABus/d9CcbhFjPKc/s320/Evernote+Camera+Roll+20130730+121338.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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The cosmos has always been (not a huge surprise to myself, as a dark matter-of-fact Carl Sagan fan) </div>
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my favorite flower.</div>
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<br /></div>
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It's now become my Official State-of-Being Flower.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I've just adopted it for myself, but since this land is your land, too, you're welcome to it.</div>
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<br /></div>
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In the kitchen garden of my grown-up mind, it was the first flower I planted from seed in my first house, in the light of a tiny 24"-square kitchen window with a claw hasp (which was the whole reason I bought that house, if I had to sum up).</div>
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That was years ago (13), and houses ago (2), but now cosmos come up wherever I am because I make sure I plant those seeds. What can I say?--they bloom well for me.</div>
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<br /></div>
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And they are <i>facts!-</i>-my new favorite friends in living a life committed to seeing things just as they are, to reality<i>--</i>long, slender beautiful facts to surround oneself with: that there is a payoff to pulling weeds and planting good seeds.</div>
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No matter how scattered or random or chaotic the field may appear. The constellations are clear, as well as the relationship between effort and good fruits (or flowers).</div>
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And since I'm always stalking the wordplay, there is that too: there is the relationship between tending and cultivating tenderness in oneself.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I was drawn to cosmos then for reasons that only make sense to me now: this was before I considered myself a scientist in my own mind and in my own kitchen, before I started meditating or reading about consciousness, before I had a daughter who practically sprung from seed with the a sureness that she will be an astronaut. </div>
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Before I realized that no matter where I am, I am and can be contemplative cooking.</div>
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<br /></div>
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14th C. Christian mystic Julian of Norwich (still mostly a mystery, and still uncanonized, for some equally mysterious reason) said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”</div>
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<br /></div>
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You may have heard this quote. T.S. Eliot, whom I love, copped it for his poem "Little Gidding," (which is one I teach and is a medicinal masterpiece, even if you're <i>not </i>a college writing student).</div>
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<br /></div>
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I have a little group of friends and we tend to use it when things seem insulatedly insurmountable: "All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well." </div>
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Maybe just an email. Just a text. But a message like that can be like a flash-rain of goodness, can buoy your drooping stem (and is a very good use of technology).</div>
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<br /></div>
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My favorite thing about this quote is that she starts with "And."</div>
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Imagine, if we all started everything we said with that word. <i>And.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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These words are said to have been directly imparted to Julian from God. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Since God is in the details, I make a note to myself to start using this with my children, especially my daughter. I wonder what it would be like if all parents answered more of children's real questions, always some form of: will it be okay?</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b><i>Will </i>all be well?</b></div>
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<br /></div>
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I can't promise them or anyone it won't change because all life (Buddhist, Christian, atheist, or flora) <i>is</i> impermanence, but for the first time in my life, I know I can promise it will be okay.</div>
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Not just okay, <i>well.</i></div>
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The great thing about wisdom (and beauty and goodness) is that you don't have to know where it comes from for it to help you.</div>
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<br /></div>
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You don't have to research it to death or find the source--to source it in <i>yourself.</i></div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
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And that line is "all manner of thing"--not<i> things</i>, incidentally. </div>
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That's not a typo.</div>
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All <i>and</i> thing.<br />
The everything and the One.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Because really, everything is all the same. All one.</div>
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<br />
<i></i></div>
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And well, well, Now.</div>
Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-8997858434902332932013-07-26T10:01:00.000-04:002013-07-26T14:36:17.906-04:00Yeast: On the Nature of Reality, Arising & Pigs in Blankets<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a473N40fB_U/UfJ_36NWJoI/AAAAAAAABts/cKUis_5Ynt8/s1600/Evernote+Camera+Roll+20130724+064251.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-a473N40fB_U/UfJ_36NWJoI/AAAAAAAABts/cKUis_5Ynt8/s400/Evernote+Camera+Roll+20130724+064251.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
<div class="p1">
Munching blackberries from the back field and homemade pigs in blankets, for which we used this clearly expiration date-defying yeast in the dough, 7 year-old Otto begs the innocent question: "Mom, what's reality?" </div>
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<br /></div>
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Less than crisp with the L's due to the dough, which is understandable--to me, but not to his sister.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Ava, 9, has an eerie grasp of the cosmos but a persistent need to draw attention to other people's limitations in order to explain it:</div>
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"It's rea<i>l life,</i> Aw-TO." </div>
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<br /></div>
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Loooong arc of an eyeroll, whilst studiously considering a single blackberry.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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Oh my. In this kitchen, overly crisp enunciation like that, paired with an accent stress reconfiguration?--generally means the conversation's going to bake up flat for the other person. </div>
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Herein lies the entwined breadstick reality of DNA combined with several hundred thousand runs through the dough conditioner over the years. </div>
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You see, in this exchange I see clearly my own rigid need for linguistic precision in others, usually vigorously kneaded into the faulty belief that if I just say the exact same thing over again more slooooowly--and the other person sees me doing this for his benefit (that "his" <i>could</i> be a pronoun, could be a husband)--he will somehow be more inclined to truly understand me.</div>
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And I won't have to alter any of my ideas, viewpoints, or tactics.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The reality is that excellent articulation still isn't clarity, and may never give rise to true understanding. </div>
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<br /></div>
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"Reality," she goes on, "as evidenced by atoms, protons, hair strands, viruses, and dust motes--even the ones you can't see."</div>
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<br /></div>
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I brace against the dust motes-in-a-sunny-kitchen-observation, and yet I soften as I also understand--no particular enunciation necessary.</div>
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<br /></div>
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"Yes, she's right," I concede. "That's true about the unseen dust motes." <i>Are you kidding?</i> I shudder. <i>Especially those little unseen things. </i></div>
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<br /></div>
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Sometimes, I feel like I'm trapped inside a discarded scene from Madeleine L'Engle's<i> A Wrinkle in Time</i>, one the beloved science fiction writer snatched out of her typewriter, bunched up into a paper popcorn ball, and flung from her hands, thinking, "Oh, I can't write them like that. No one will believe two young children actually talk like that. Centaurs, yes. But 7 and 9 year olds?" </div>
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I have my own eerily attuned Charles Wallace and thorny, brilliant Meg, which I guess makes me Mrs. Wallace--whom I always wanted to be when I grew up anyway--with her own lab right off the kitchen.</div>
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<br /></div>
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"Oh, yeast is part of the kingdom Fungi," Ava says, in one of those mercilessly knowledgeable asides. "That was in my chemistry class."</div>
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<br /></div>
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"I'm eating fungi?!?!?," he flails. "AAAAAHHHHHHCKKK!" </div>
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<br /></div>
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And then a pause and a glance at the blanketed piggy headed towards his mouth--but only a pause because fresh bread you make yourself (in any form) is good, and so there is a swallow.</div>
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"Wait--what's 'the Kingdom Fungi' again, Ava?"</div>
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Basically this fungi, this living thing, yeast, converts sugar (or carbs, more specifically) into carbon dioxide and, in fermentation, alcohols. The same mechanism that works (or in my case, as a former drinker, <i>doesn't </i>work) in beer and wine also works in the rest of life--especially in my daily quest to bake & <a href="http://www.wisebrain.org/TakingintheGood.pdf" target="_blank">take in the good.</a></div>
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<br /></div>
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Because I'm interested in the taproots of things, especially words, I can tell you that the Indo-European root of yeast is<i> yes</i>-, meaning "boil", "foam", or "bubble."</div>
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And yes is good.</div>
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This also means that yeast contributes to positive space, not negative. In art or aesthetics this refers to what's there, as opposed to the space around it.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I think I've got it a working definition for them: </div>
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Me: "Reality is the usable space. Reality is what we can actually see."</div>
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<br /></div>
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Otto: "What about things that are too small to see?"</div>
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<br /></div>
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Me: "It's whatever and however that is for each person-however it hits <i>your </i>eyes." </div>
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<br /></div>
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Ava: "Actually, your eyes turn things upside-down, but your brain corrects for this." </div>
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<br /></div>
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I feel a sudden sweet pang of relief, and tears actually spring to my eyes for what I hadn't even had the good sense to worry about: how objects translate to images in anyone's right mind.</div>
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Yes, I feel gratitude for my brain, for going ahead and reducing complexity, doing something kind for me and not ever needing to tell me about it to get credit.</div>
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Like when you've just had a baby, and haven't considered there will be an <i>after</i> labor or that you'll be starving once you get there, and some kind soul (probably another mother), uses your extra key and fills your fridge before you get home.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Indeed, reality is a lot of stuff you can't see--especially kindness.</div>
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<br /></div>
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And the reality is that people love my pigs in blankets because they love <i>all</i> pigs in blankets--it's a universal concept: little, portable, hand-held bites of love wrapped in warm dough. There's no I, Me, Mine with a concept like that, with love.</div>
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<br /></div>
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A few years ago, pigs in blankets were all the rage with very chi-chi caterers in NYC and LA--all the big cities were serving them up even at very lavish events: a snortacious cyclone of hunger, which left vast, empty platters at every event. </div>
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Every time.</div>
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<br /></div>
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And then it went away again. I was a child of the 70s and a teen in the late, decadent 80s--I smelled a lot of cocktail parties through the walls. </div>
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<br /></div>
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People like these old-style "pick-ups," like cocktail meatballs and rumaki and angels on horseback and pigs in blankets because they're retro, but also because they're starving for the past--perhaps even nostalgic for foods they never had, but feel they <i>should</i> have had, and let's face it, little retro foods gather people over conversation.</div>
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They would feel this way about meatloaf and mashed potatoes, if they were portable.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I've made a vegetarian approximation of pigs in blankets, and they were just fine, since the key component of cocktail weiners, hot dogs sausages, etc. isn't a meaty issue at all, just a salty one. You could place a pair of Vibrams in a strong brine, and I'm reasonably certain you could replicate the effect.</div>
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Now, if I could make a vegan, gluten free cocktail weiner with minimal, earth-friendly packaging (read: NOT in the annoying plastic airtight thingie which you have to cut open and get the juice all over yourself), then I suppose I'd be in the business of business, not just observation.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I'd also be compelled to figure out, definitively, why the word weiner is so impossibly funny--for all ages. I don't know. But it is. Say it out loud.</div>
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A piece of blanket went flying out of someone's mouth.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Isn't it possible that the draw here is possibility itself? Yeast<i> is </i>that possibility incarnate: this could happen, given the right conditions. </div>
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Buddhism teaches us that what comes out of our grist mills is the knowledge that something will happen and it will cause something else to happen. This is the nature of reality.</div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-K-D2KfN1TlY/UfKAhQ1GO-I/AAAAAAAABt0/rnmR5myV3Vs/s1600/Evernote+Camera+Roll+20130724+070957.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-K-D2KfN1TlY/UfKAhQ1GO-I/AAAAAAAABt0/rnmR5myV3Vs/s400/Evernote+Camera+Roll+20130724+070957.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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In this way, the pig in a blanket--no matter whether it's gluten-free, vegan, or chock full of nitrates and sodium--is another possible gyroscope to the now (I'm huge fan of of the gyroscope as an object of attention--especially during "washing dishes meditation"--if they can help navigate space craft, why not my life?)</div>
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<br /></div>
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I'll be honest: I shimmed this one with an almond to demonstrate the effect, but if you were here at this kitchen table and not in a photograph (and I wish you were), you'd have seen it, too.</div>
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<br /></div>
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No matter what we can ever make with with our human hands: be it for love or for hate, be it blanketed or scoped--we can only spiral back to the same old center, and central understanding:</div>
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Something will happen. And we'll just have to see.</div>
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<br /></div>
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It's what's here now that matters. </div>
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The God of very small things, like yeast. And you can't see possibility working until you see it working--until you test it out.</div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
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And that's a wrap.</div>
Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-8911627155529283572013-07-16T13:04:00.000-04:002013-07-16T13:04:10.643-04:00With a Little Potluck: Gathering What Paul McCartney & Sharon Salzberg Know About Interdependence<div class="p1">
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A potluck wedding in our back field, two years ago today. </div>
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I was looking for secret recipes, for someone with experience to tuck a cookie into my hand for the unknown.<br />
<br />
I realize now I was trying to source wisdom, which is what I'm always doing: trying to source love for love to make more, which is the only way it really goes.<br />
<br />
"Join Us": this is what I wrote on the evites.<br />
<br />
I thought this was clever wedding wordplay. It's also what happened.</div>
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"No gifts, just bring something nourishing to share, something only you could make," I wrote. </div>
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Maybe it takes a village to raise a child, but it takes a farm full of hands to raise a barn--or a second marriage, one with 5 kids and two former lives combined. All these hearts joined together--you know, the big red kind, with the slings and arrows of life drawn on them in inedible ink.</div>
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<br /></div>
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We themed the day with the Wings' song <i>With a Little Luck</i>, which seemed like planting more guidance, from one of our most trusted sources, Paul (and Linda) McCartney:</div>
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<i>The willow turns his back on inclement weather;</i></div>
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<i>And if he can do it, we can do it, just me and you</i></div>
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Since we live in Maryland (better known as the Armpit of the East Coast), this also seemed like a good fit, since perfectly dry, 81-degree back field wedding days in July simply can't be bought or made. And I can make pretty much anything.</div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I4AekNP-Hmw/UeVz3huHnxI/AAAAAAAABsE/GDCd4a7Stok/s1600/willowshot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I4AekNP-Hmw/UeVz3huHnxI/AAAAAAAABsE/GDCd4a7Stok/s400/willowshot.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
We also planted a scraggly little willow tree for the ceremony because, let's face it, I needed the metaphor: the tenacious tree that can source water from anyplace, its limbs endlessly pliant, never breaking. </div>
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I <i>need</i> the metaphor, but my husband actually <i>is </i>the metaphor--he never breaks.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The willow counters breakage with sway; something powerless--done <i>to</i> it, with something <i>it</i> can do, by embodiment:<i> sway</i>.</div>
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The only tree to my knowledge that, like the Buddha, keeps straightening and expanding upwards, while simultaneously touching the ground with one limb (or many limbs), eliminating doubt with that perfect circuit.</div>
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There's a lot of doubt with a second marriage--you feel it in your trunk.</div>
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And I loved the scientific backstory: The genus <i>salix</i> contains an element that was well-known to ancients to reduce inflammation, cool fever, save lives. Salicin is, in stable form, salicylic acid--common aspirin.</div>
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With all sorts of mixed-family blessings and unknown fevers running high prior to the wedding, on many nights it seemed wise to plant two and call back in the morning. </div>
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My meditation was walking off frustration in the back field, chanting my steps. Looking up at the sky's vast blue balm by day, trying to locate the north star by night. Giving up my questions to some bigger back field of awareness: Will this work out? Can I take this risk? What do I do? A July wedding in such heat?--all variations of my favorite storyline:<i> Am I crazy?</i></div>
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Well, you dig yourself holes, and you plant new things. And you sweat, and you plan, and you brace against the worst--and no matter what you do, it never turns out like you think anyway. With happiness, headaches, and heat, you can't plan or predict the degrees with any accuracy.</div>
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One moment you're afraid and alone and the next, your friends are all there in your back field, bearing the subtlest gifts. Feeding and reading you morsels of Rumi and Rilke, Wendell Berry and Kahlil Gibran (yes, people still read <i>The Prophet</i> at weddings), in regular, soft speaking voices, barefoot under a cloudless blue sky that is capable of both holding and amplifying every word. </div>
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<i>With a little luck, we can help it out.</i></div>
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<i>We can make this whole damn thing work out.</i></div>
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Each person, just being there and saying whatever arises in a Quaker-Buddhist inspired-sometimes-silence where you marry yourselves by agreeing, pretty basically, to keep being there no matter what comes up.</div>
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No matter what arises.<br />
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By the way, we didn't know too many fancy Buddhist terms back then: like "dependent arising." I didn't think of silence or of my cooking-to-get-free methods as contemplative, in those exact terms,<i> though that's just what it is</i>--and you don't have to either. You don't have to take on any special terms including mine to be happy and get a little bit freer. </div>
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What you need is the paradox of a little luck, which is not luck at all: it's interdependence--the state of being where you potluck-out. </div>
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I don't think anyone understands the concept of interdependence better than Paul McCartney. That everything--and everyone--rests in relationship to all else. </div>
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A little luck, however, turns out to rest on a lot of skill: cultivating love so that you can extract love<i> from yourself, so that you can feed yourself and others: </i></div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
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<i>With a little love, we can lay it down.</i></div>
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<i>Cant you feel the town exploding?</i></div>
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<i>There is no end to what we can do together.</i></div>
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<i>There is no end, there is no end.</i></div>
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I couldn't have written the story that is my actual life, which is better, juicier, thornier, and plumper than any mythical berry I've ever spied in those bushes--and I sure as heck can't quibble with Sir Paul and think I could write The End.<br />
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But I can tell you a bit about the middle parts and the Middle Way of it:<br />
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You might stop in the middle part of the joining and just observe, survey, look around and see people, perched on the rounds of an ancient cherry tree that went down by natural causes in your old life when the truth came out (I cannot tell a lie: this happened), upcycled into perfectly wide, flat stump-seating. You might see very clearly that these people are happy. </div>
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I've started thinking about happiness as a communal meal and process, which transcends any particular ingredient.</div>
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That it's not just you and your happiness on some mythical day. Not just <i>you </i>happy, and you didn't do it, but you helped, and so did they--create the environment of happiness.<br />
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The palpable, interdependently delicious state of happiness.<br />
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Nobody brought that potluck ingredient, by the way, "happiness": they brought salty-sweet mouth-aching molasses cookies,<br />
and life-is-a-bowl of beautiful Ranier cherries, and homemade, soft German pretzels,<br />
35 pounds of hand-pulled barbecue (thanks, Mom), and simple syrups of clementine and rhubarb for Italian sodas.<br />
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Nope, no happiness--and yet, it was very clearly on the table. </div>
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Happiness also has to transcend outcomes, for which there are always conditions (most of which are out of our control).<br />
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The figures (original 1960s Beatles Wilton toppers) may go sliding off the cake but they probably won't break--it may even be only Ringo, who was pretty stable, being seated, and in two parts (drum set separate).<br />
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There are causes for every outcome. If, say, you're really smitten with and dedicated to spice cake and cream cheese icing in July, then the consistency of your icing may change--but consistently, according to the laws of the universe. (Instead of the "The Haters Always Hate," I'm going to make a dharmabumper sticker with lovingkindness that says, "The Causes Always Cause.")</div>
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Stuff breaks and slides, straps slip--usually five minutes to showtime; it's an endless loop. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0761159258/?tag=googhydr-20&hvadid=13357241797&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=15185001321165253875&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_pgdfo4wmt_b" target="_blank">Real Happiness</a> must transcend the constant slippage of the moment. If you can remember that there's nothing all that special or showy about any moment in time, then you can relax into it (I wasn't nervous at all on our wedding day), and access the skills you already have inside.<br />
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If you can keep your cool and get some space to thread the eye of this uber-useful fisherman's needle you keep on hand with some dental floss (cinnamon-scented is nice, for calming), you can actually stop, breathe, gather your attention together, sew it up, and keep heading down the back field--go forward and marry the moment.</div>
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Thank you, <a href="http://www.sharonsalzberg.com/" target="_blank">Sharon Salzberg</a>, for the simple phrase "gather your attention" and for just that particular soft way you say it in guided meditation--for inspiring me to remember that gathering attention just like fabric in a potential crisis is a very useful <i>life-skill</i>. A push off the shore. </div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
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<i>With a little push, we could set it off.</i></div>
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<i>We can send it rocketing skywards.</i><br />
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<i><i>With a little love, we could shake it up.</i></i></div>
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<i>Don't you feel the comet exploding?</i></div>
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Just me and you: me-allofus and you-allofus, and the moment that really really wants to marry us.</div>
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/9XViNAoCq-k" width="560"></iframe>
It's not luck, friends, it's fortune. The path of the willow: a good fortune.</div>
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Watch the video-especially the interdependent interplay of every person in it. </div>
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It's such good fun and such a good song. I wonder what would happen if people made it a practice to listen every day?</div>
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PS: Deepest love and thanks to my dear husband, for joining me--joining Us.<br />
<br />
PPS: Speaking of interdependence, we got the chance to see <a href="http://marianne-elliott.com/" target="_blank">Marianne Elliott </a>and Sharon Salzberg speak together at <a href="http://www.buddhafest.org/" target="_blank">Buddhafest</a>--a trifecta/sweet confecta experience! Human story is more than the sum of its speakers--or its ingredients. Each of these three are beautiful resources for inner resourcing.Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-72328577090907900902013-07-14T15:09:00.001-04:002013-07-15T07:49:17.844-04:00Blueberreasoning: Poisonous Fruit in the Kitchen Sink of the Mind--& the Triple Gem Rinse<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"Blueberreasoning" is the sort of thinking and overthinking--basically trying to figure it all out--that's addictive and slippery as dark little pearls, falling right through your hands into the kitchen sink of your mind.</div>
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It's just a seasonal variety of basically poisonous fruit--not accepting things right now, wanting it to be different than it is, not seeing clearly--<i>even if </i>that's seeing blue and not red. There will never be another berry in July-type thinking. </div>
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It's true I have this nifty across-the-kitchen-sink colander, and that helps with this problem to some degree. It spans the gap perfectly and holds the contents of my mind suspended, where I can rinse them to my head's content, picking them for the stones, stems & other inedible elements I've decided are unworkable.<br />
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Notice that a tool designed to help us--e.g., a sieve--can <i>still </i>effectively hold the fruit of the original problem--no matter how sweet it is. </div>
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However, most tools do (at least) double duty, and this one is no exception: it's <i>also </i>convenient for keeping all the blueberreasoning from heading straight down into that ultimate disposal: the mashup where tongue meets head, and, bypassing the heart, creates an entirely new, unintended product <i>which is still only more thinking</i>.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Though my "Why have one when you can have three?" days have some years-since passed, it doesn't seem to work that way with thoughts consistently. I'm not always thoughtfully consistent with my thoughts. Not yet. </div>
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Sometimes thinking is helpful. Say, if there's a bear in the blueberry bushes, the thought "RUN" may (quickly) occur to you--but that's a whole-body sensation, a beak to tail embodiment that tells the wings (succinctly, with no big words) to unfurl and flap fierce and far from that bush.<br />
The thoughts I'm talking about are just in the bramble of your head, arising like gnatty, stickery, endless bushes to be plucked. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Instead of just eating these blueberries, I'll find I'm thinking about them as individual entities, as I'm rinsing them and overrinsing them. I'm caught up in their beauty and isolated little perfections and imperfections, instead of taking them as a blue-black, mosaic <i>whole.</i></div>
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And when I do this--pensive-pluck--I only feel more isolated. </div>
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I'm wondering what to make with them, I'm stopping to dry my hands so I can photograph them, even thinking about how fast they'll go bad once they get wet and that I should freeze them so I can use them in winter, instead of just keeping my hands in it, feeling their blueberriness rinsing through me.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I don't know anyone who can eat three blueberries. The same is true with any addiction: whether it's blueberreasoning, or drinking, or thinking. </div>
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If you love the taste, that's too little; If you loathe it, why bother?</div>
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<br /></div>
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Blueberreasoning won't get you there--no matter how sweet it feels at the time (and how utterly necessary it feels--I know, friends). It won't get you to some mythical there, but it will rob you of every purple-juicy bit of <i>here,</i> which is all there is.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Because I like threes of things--I always have--I make it a practice to stop and notice that number in what I'm doing, and to juice that understanding for the comfort I find in it. </div>
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And I noticed that my son (who rarely leaves any but the most flat, odd musty berry) left these three blueberries sitting on a teeny yellow espresso saucer.</div>
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<br /></div>
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One may be the loneliest number, but three may be the one most often associated with sacred matters--Dostoevesky was fond of the number, and most people, religious or not, are familiar with The Holy Trinity. We've discussed Yoda-toed terra firma in the past, and of course the sturdy reliability of the triangle, and <i>nothing</i> is more stable than a three-legged kitchen stool. Buddhists are also fond of three: taking refuge in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha.</div>
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I'm no Pali scholar, I'm just your source for dishtowel dharma, but I do find this practice very, very useful, and you might, too.</div>
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<span class="s1">Tara Brach gives a much sweeter <a href="http://blog.tarabrach.com/2013/07/taking-refuge-in-buddha.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tarabrach%2FHhFL+%28Tara+Brach%29" target="_blank">overview of this practice</a> than I can--but here's how it works for me, in this kitchen: </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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Each day, I stop, dry my hands, and recommit to giving up sweetly treacherous blueberreasoning, and I root myself in these three things:</div>
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<br /></div>
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1. the Buddha--It's possible to wake up out of the berry-blunted mind. It's actually possible to get free.</div>
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2. the Dharma--There's an ancient, wise, and well-traveled path to and<i> from</i> the berry bushes. There are laws to sticker-scratch suffering, and to untangling ourselves which always hold. <i>Always</i>. (The sky always holds--it's a promise).</div>
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and </div>
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3. the Sangha--there's a whole patch of people in this world dedicated to becoming thorn-free, who are not ascetics at all, but actually adore blueberries. They will help you, and actually sit at your table and trade recipes with you, and you will feel <i>full.</i> </div>
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<br /></div>
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And that's all I've got for today. </div>
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If by <i>all</i>, you mean that I know I can't stop at one (of anything), but I also understand that I can, in this practice, stop at three, and start again. </div>
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Every day.</div>
<br />
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Try it--let me know if you find yourself threaping some of the same rewards.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>May you be happy. May you be peaceful. May you be full. </i></div>
Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-77603544618481881632013-06-21T19:26:00.002-04:002013-06-22T10:54:34.556-04:00In Watermelon Sugar: The MettaSeed-Spitting Contest (Willy Wonka, Chögyam Trungpa, and "I," with recipe)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>I guess you are kind of curious as to who I am, but I am one of those who do not have a regular name. My name depends on you. Just call me whatever is in your mind. (</i>Richard Brautigan <i> In Watermelon Sugar)</i></div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
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Well, gentle readers, if I made a practice of calling things <i>whatever</i> was in my mind, I'd never get the words out--there are too many in there. This doesn't mean I'm very smart; it <i>does</i> mean I know a lot of words, that they get in the way. </div>
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And, mindful of this quote: it's whatever's in <i>your</i> mind that will flavor the way you read it. </div>
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I may not always be able to come up with the precise word for things, but I'll trip over my tongue trying--and worst of all, render myself unable to taste anything that's happening right now, in the process. This is the danger of a crowded mind. Discursive thought closes down the taste buds before real taste can bloom inside them. </div>
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<br /></div>
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Maybe this is one of the reasons we don't speak in meditation. So we don't inadvertently open our mouths and taste something going by, another distracting flavor we will then feel the burden to parse(ley).</div>
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<br /></div>
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I remember reading Richard Brautigan's <i>In Watermelon Sugar</i> for the first time when I was 20 years old. He was one of my first exposures to metaliterature: literature aware of itself.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Notice, I didn't say self-<i>conscious</i>. That one, I already knew.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I notice a strange, nostalgic, war-story quality to these words as I type them. A story about a story about myself which I am telling. "Metaliterature" sounds academically cheeky and termy and maybe snobbish and strivey, and that's not my intention, and yet--it's all of those things, and none at the same time. </div>
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It's just a word, I say, wet-my-whistling in the dark. <i>Metaliterature. </i><br />
<i><br /></i></div>
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Words are our best guess at naming things to keep them under some sort of control--trust me, I've been using wordplay to harness my surroundings to feel safer for years. I have generated my own private thalamus thesaurus dedicated to feeling-synonyms, which is lovely to flip through and find just the right word to etymologize, parse, and even chant, all in an academic excursion not to feel the feeling the word embodies.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I'm actually 99% certain (without documentation), that the deepest and oldest part of our brain, reptilian and survival-oriented, is actually a storage unit for sticky letter-formations which we create in our personal limbic labs, designed to bandaid over the fear.</div>
<div class="p1">
But then we get stuck on the bandaid, cause the bandaid's stuck on ME--the conditioning of the self; we get stuck with whatever's under the bandaid that was trying to cushion the hurt, even long after that specific wound's all mended. They don't go anywhere. Sticky protection piles mount, sometimes very slowly, layer by layer, until you can't help but trip over them every time, just trying to get by. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I'm also pretty sure that the brain stem is, primarily, a glorified linguistic chute. It's what the words go up and flail in, enlarging themselves when you feel you're in trouble, like Augustus Gloop going up the pipe. And when you try to fight them as phenomena, as just another sensory experience--tell them No! DON'T drink the chocolate! Don't go in there!--they get stuck, instead of just passing through. I know this because it happens to me about 91% of the time (which is way down from 100%, with 2 years of meditation).</div>
<div class="p1">
In my experience, the really big complicated and frightening words seem most apt to get stuck there--and then, building pressure, they finally push through <i>but then, out of sight, they get lodged firmly</i> in the lowest realm of the brain anyway, trapped two floors down from the frontal cortex where they could do you any real, reasonable good.</div>
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It's Wonka-y.</div>
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<br /></div>
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If you watch this clip, you will be fascinated. </div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Y2gH2b2WcGI" width="560"></iframe>
I<br />
A little later, Willy Wonka calmly addresses Mrs. Gloop's concerns:<br />
<div class="p1">
"Oh, the pressure'll get him out. There's pressure building up behind the blockage. </div>
The suspense is killing me--I hope it'll continue."<br />
<br />
I use Roald Dahl's books with everyone I've ever taught, Kindergarten through college--especially <i>Charlie and the Chocolate Factory</i>. Mostly, probably really mostly, because I learn something new about <i>myself</i> every single time I teach with them. Willy Wonka is the fictional character "I" most identify with. I was once Wonka for Halloween, velvet overcoat and all. I was believable. Why? Because I believed the story:
<br />
<div class="p1">
The Wonkaesque creative overload, the need to make things just because you thought them up and because you probably can. Getting stuck in the mire of your own sweet creations."Sure, you <i>can </i>execute every idea you ever have <i>if you kill yourself</i>," my darling husband says--which may be the point, killing the Self.<br />
The driving, striving need to make EVERYTHING you ever think up, no matter who's onboard with you--or overboard, in the chocolate soup.</div>
<div class="p1">
And, deep Oompa-Loompa truth, disguised as a song: that your creations are not actually yours, that you cannot control them--or other people's responses to them--once they take form.<br />
They change other people. They change you. You can't hang on.<br />
It shatters like a psychedelic lollipop.</div>
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The more you hang on, the stickier it gets, and the more likely it's going to get stuck in the pipe--<i>because it's ALL going up there anyway.</i></div>
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So let go--which sounds spun-sugar simple, but is toothache hard.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I actually don't really like candy (which makes this mettaphor go down easier, since I'm not all that attached) but I especially do not like candy that is supposed to taste like fruit: meta-flavors which make you only consider the taste of the real thing, and then miss it terribly. Certain flavors seem to engender this tendency more than others. By far the worst offenders are banana, cherry, and, absolutely the worst is...watermelon.</div>
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It's meta-candy. Named for the thing it will force you to consider. And yet it's not the name itself. Or even the fruit itself.</div>
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The experience of tasting the meta-candy forces us to say its name and consider what it's not, but you remember what it is because you tasted the real thing at some point in the past:</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer.</i></div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
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Cosmic Now and Laters are legendary for producing this effect, by the way.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>That is my name.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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Think of all the names we give ourselves to describe ourselves in every single moment but this one, kind and more often, unkind!: I use<i> butcher </i>when I'm harmful or cruel,<i> baker</i> when I manage, in the end, to pull together the recipe for forgiveness and plate the love, <i>candlestick maker</i> when someone shares that something I've said has been helpful, pointing them back to their own ghee lamp in their particular chocolatey darkness. </div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
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That space in which we don't know is really important. </div>
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<br /></div>
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That's why I gave a lot of space to that line.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>Perhaps it was raining very hard.</i></div>
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<i>That is my name.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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If all we are, as the Buddha said, is at the result of all we have thought, well-- I am exactly the result of all of these thoughts.</div>
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A brain stem clogged with Gloop designed to protect us, which has now outlived its usefulness? Isn't that the the be all, end all?</div>
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This insight rains down-up on me, Roald Dahl-style:</div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i><br /></div>
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<i>Augustus Gloop! Augustus Gloop! </i></div>
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<i>The great big greedy nincompoop!</i></div>
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<i>Augustus Gloop! So big and vile</i></div>
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<i>So greedy, foul, and infantile</i></div>
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<i>Come on!' we cried, 'The time is ripe </i></div>
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<i>To send him shooting up the pipe!</i></div>
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<i>But don't, dear children, be alarmed;</i></div>
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<i>Augustus Gloop will not be harmed,</i></div>
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<i>Although, of course, we must admit</i></div>
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<i>He will be altered quite a bit.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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And it will alter you, these understandings in the body, if you let them. Only the trick is, that you don't have the kind of control you think you have, once it's set to go off in you.</div>
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What do you think meta-bolism is? </div>
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Still, we try to control it. We forsake the experience of living, of picking what's there growing wild, in favor of scrabbling to find the word to describe the experience. </div>
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Thinking about your own thinking has a stuckness to it, but here's the transformative piece (and this works for anxiety, fear, anger, ____ [insert whatever you're working with]): </div>
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If I am thinking about my thinking, then I am not my thinking.</div>
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Just let that sit on your tongue a second.</div>
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If I am not my thinking, then there is a space between myself and the thinking. I am not that.</div>
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It's the ____-ing about the ____-ing formula that makes this particular recipe for suffering.</div>
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In a way, we are all writing about living, for example, every time we tweet or update our Facebook statuses.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>Or somebody wanted you to do something. You did it. Then they told you what you did was wrong—“Sorry for the mistake,”—and you had to do something else.</i></div>
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<i>That is my name.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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I'm doing something different when I meditate (meta-tate).</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I wouldn't call metaliterature my "primary area of interest"--or even a possibly dissertation topic--I would just call it what's<span class="s1"> </span><i>happening here right now</i>. That's the definition, in my mind, but still it's not its name.</div>
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That's why it's mettaliterature: the words that bestow circular, lovingkindness back on the writer.</div>
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It's self-reflective and washing out as rain (for me) and transformative for everybody involved. </div>
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I'm a person writing about my own thinking, about my processes, about my cooking. But mostly, it's a story about a story. It's a lost nursery rhyme, a hopscotch chant, in Oompa Loom<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pali_Canon" target="_blank">pali</a>.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>Perhaps it was a game you played when you were a child or something that came idly into your mind when you were old and sitting in a chair near the window.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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We make up the words we need. We set our "terms"--do you see? </div>
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The methods maven in me has come to see that I no longer care what its called (well, okay except when I really do, being so attached language), I just care if it's useful. Does it work?<br />
Ava came up with the term <i>Ivyprofen</i> to cure poison ivy (maybe it works on strhives).</div>
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What is behind the word, behind the naming, striving, hiving, the incessant hiding from the thing itself?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>That is my name.</i></div>
<div class="p5">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Or you walked someplace. There were flowers all around.</i></div>
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<i>That is my name.</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Perhaps you stared into a river. There as something near you who loved you. They were about to touch you. You could feel this before it happened. Then it happened.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Lowercase r realization. Garden-variety, transformative aha.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>That is my name.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
It's just a big loop. This is story about story, in one way or another: reading, writing, considering. It's a feedback loop. So, here we are: in this kitchen, in a metaphorical eatback-feedback loop. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
<span class="s2">Now, if we just kept suffering, endlessly, if there were no possibility, even melon-thin, to transcend the suffering, then that would be s</span>aṃsāra: the over and over birth-death-life of absolutely everything--literally and metaphorically.<br />
However, the Buddha was clear that there is way out of these realms--six, with different samsaric flavors--of suffering. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p4">
For today, let's just consider the human realm. That's where Willy Wonka and yes, I, have Brautiganed us. </div>
<div class="p4">
A big part of this human realm suffering is…intellectual stuffing--not to mention the passion of creative stuffing. Right now (and this is in addition to six other books, which is just plain-yogurt-silly, isn't it? Who could digest all that at once?), I am reading <i>The Sanity We Are Born With: A Buddhist Approach to Psychology, </i>and let me tell you that Chögyam Trungpa's got me, completely cuts through me, like a melon knife:</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p4" style="text-align: left;">
"Passion is the major occupation in the human realm…There is a heroic attitude, the attempt to create monuments, the biggest, greatest, historical monument. This heroic approach is based on fascination with what you lack…The intellect is most active in the human realm. There is so much going on in your mind as a result of having collected so many things and having planned so many projects.The epitome of the human realm is to be stuck in a huge traffic jam of discursive thought [emphasis mine]."</div>
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Mettathud & Sweet Melon Spit.</div>
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There is an effortlessness, a simplicity, and a dancing game to Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche's teachings which is very sweet and easy in the mouth. Also a rascaly, seed-spitting contest quality--maybe <i>at </i>you, at times (and that is also Wonka-like). But that's all fine because you're outside on a warm day in the sunshine, and you don't mind because they're seeds; it's not like they really hurt when they land. They're not hard. And if you (I!) could just stop taking yourself so, so seriously, you'd relax and seed it's all meant with love and with fun--with JOY, And you can just run over to the spigot and hose off before you go back inside to your pristine and dark house.</div>
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If you want. Any time you want to go back in the cave--I mean--<i>house.</i></div>
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We ALL have watermelon seeds stuck to our skin anyway, drying and clinging to us, that we don't even realize have been spit from somewhere/one/thing else. So get over it. We all look equally silly. The trick is to Buddhist seed-spitting contests is to be completely aware of this and 1) not prefer to look any different, and 2) understand that although it's not really a contest, you still have to play your part.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>Slowly, the wheels go round and round,</i></div>
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<i>The cogs begin to grind and pound;</i></div>
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<i>We boil him for a minute more,</i></div>
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<i>Until we're absolutely sure</i></div>
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<i>Then out he comes! And now! By grace!</i></div>
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<i>A miracle has taken place!</i></div>
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<i>A miracle has taken place!</i></div>
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<i>This greedy brute, this louse's ear,</i></div>
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<i>Is loved by people everywhere!</i></div>
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<i>For who could hate or bear a grudge</i></div>
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<i>Against a luscious bit of fudge?</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8tZ0Eo3RDIk/UcTesHn0s6I/AAAAAAAABno/4-oaa9hyg8o/s1600/IMG_7026.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8tZ0Eo3RDIk/UcTesHn0s6I/AAAAAAAABno/4-oaa9hyg8o/s400/IMG_7026.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
The cogs and the blades of my blender start going. A non-recipe comes to mind. I don't know why this method works for me, but it does: transform the words to food, transform my own suffering.<br />
<br /></div>
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You <i>don't</i> need a fancy NutriBullet or a wordy recipe for this. I promise.<br />
<br />
Just blend freely, upwards and out:<br />
<br /></div>
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<i><b>watermelon, cucumber, ice, lemon (gentle basil twist)</b></i></div>
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<br />
Forget anything added. Forget the sugar (I did). You don't need it. You just have to let go of <i>thinking </i>you need that specific ingredient. That's the thing with methods.</div>
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<br /></div>
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You can do it yourself, said the Buddha.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Do you know what I love most about melons? They taste like clarity sounds. And clarity carries you forward, up, out of the vortex.</div>
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It gets you unstuck. By grace. By absolute, sweet, succulent grace.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Ava, age 9, has a list of research questions she's generated on the "experiment fridge" (the one in the mud room), and one of them is "Is watermelon classified as a succulent?"</div>
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She asked this again today.</div>
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"If it isn't called one, it should be. It's what it <i>does.</i>"</div>
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A succulent carries water inside itself, and so, transforms itself, by nourishing itself.</div>
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<br /></div>
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"Across the desert lies the promise land."--Willy Wonka</div>
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And it's a succulent.</div>
<br />
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That is my name. That is.<br />
<br />
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<b>That is mettaliterature: in reading ourselves with love, aware of the Self, we are freed.</b></div>
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<br /></div>
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An acknowledgment and a Fun Fact Bonus!</div>
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<b></b><br /></div>
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<b>Acknowledgement:</b> Speaking of seeds and of finding the words, I was deeply moved and influenced by a talk titled <a href="http://www.dharmaseed.org/talks/audio_player/77/19680.html" target="_blank">"Clarity and Freedom Can Illuminate Our Relationships With Others"</a> I heard via Dharma Seed, given by meditation teacher <a href="http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/77/" target="_blank">Gregory Kramer.</a> It was a limn-line for me, for which I am grateful. It plumbs the depths of not only language, but the urge to communicate. I loved it. It was meta-utlity, at its finest. He goes into the heavier, geeky stuff I love--the physical ways sound transmits in the body and through it, but most of all, he talks about this urge to vibrate, to communicate. Willy Wonka might have understood his wish for the tension and suspense to continue, in the context of Kramer's words: "Without tension, there's no vibration…No seriously, it's hilarious, but it's also remarkable."</div>
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<br /></div>
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<b>Fun Fact!:</b> I would highly recommend reading<a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0330234439" target="_blank"> <i>In Watermelon Sugar</i></a> today, if you read it in the past, especially if you're a big fan of dystopian lit and counterculture. If you do, you will notice that central to story's tension is the grasp and hub of this particular commune…called iDEATH.<br />
iKnow. Crazy wisdom, huh?<br />
<i>In Watermelon Sugar</i> was written in 1968.</div>
<br />
<div class="p1">
That's just the prescience of mettaliterature, connecting the shell of the words to the timeless, maha moment for Us.</div>
</div>
Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-22635329790947223252013-06-12T16:14:00.000-04:002013-06-12T16:14:48.209-04:00On Letgomens (bodily signs that you will get the chance, imminently, to practice letting go) & Let It Bee Balm<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-toesOWNlP8g/UbjMLRRLFFI/AAAAAAAABlU/F29biI4TzTA/s1600/the-omen-1976+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-toesOWNlP8g/UbjMLRRLFFI/AAAAAAAABlU/F29biI4TzTA/s400/the-omen-1976+copy.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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As I look up from a triple-jeweled newel post, towards a scaffolding of summer, looming as-yet-unfilled, it's still relatively quiet here--about 2.5 hours till my kids are home for the summer<i>, for good. </i>I like this play on words (as my visual prompt: "Damien watched it all go over the edge" may not immediately suggest). </div>
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A Letgomen--the bodily sign that you will get the chance, <i>imminently</i>, to practice letting go--is still a form of reactivity. And all reactions--no matter how subtle--are clues to the places we are still clinging to something. They point to our uncooked and rawest of spots. </div>
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Practicing letting go of everything except<i> </i>what is actually here<i> never fails</i> to reveal one of my most unevenly cooked spots. </div>
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I have to let go of certain beliefs about how wonderful my life would be if I could just "be" by myself. If I could just go to the forest and meditate.</div>
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As if my life wasn't this life right here. As if there could be a peacefoodlove kitchen without the peace that comes out of the love of those I cook for.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I love my children. They're not evil; they <i>are</i> good scientists, and they live in the still pretty-much country, so they're being raised to delight and instruct themselves by experimenting with their surroundings (often on rooster-time).</div>
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<br /></div>
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Me: Why is there a gyroscope in the freezer?</div>
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Them: I'm trying isolate and stop time at its center.</div>
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Me: Okay.</div>
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<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OBlrje9l9FI/UbjOLTak2fI/AAAAAAAABls/jGf0DjlimbE/s1600/PTC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-OBlrje9l9FI/UbjOLTak2fI/AAAAAAAABls/jGf0DjlimbE/s320/PTC.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The PTC "gene" is actually a complex<br />
ability to taste bitterness. It <i>should </i>give us a<br />
selective advantage over non-tasters. </td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="p2">
Points for creative solutions to life's nagging questions, and there really, really is and can be no Damien Blamien on my part, as the realization that the apple doesn't fall far from the me hits like a Newton-of-bricks. </div>
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<br /></div>
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But it's often quite messy, and frankly, the methodology isn't always completely clear to me, as I wade through a lake of toilet water (not code for "perfume") someone has been ph testing, or a 5-lb bag of flour someone else has volcanically erupted and then just left, like a glutenous crime-spattered scene across the cabinets, to go out to play. </div>
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Or, as I am meditating on the kitchen floor and must trustingly stick out my tongue to be tiny-paper-strip-tested for the PTC gene, as I've been told, "I don't need you right now Mom, I just need your tongue. You don't even have to open your eyes." </div>
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<br /></div>
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Again, delightful, but messy and unknowable in a way, say, being a tidy, solitary forest monk might not be. </div>
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And since the mess we don't know--especially the messes we inflict on ourselves--is<i> far </i>worse than the mess we do, I can tell you that my Letgomen-o-meter is going off right now because things are about to change. Any post-semester/personal writing/reading/cultivating calm (from the hours of 6 am until 9 pm) is about to be replaced by SUMMER VACATION.</div>
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</div>
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Which should be called "Summer <i>Stay</i>-cation" because that what I have to do: figure out how to stay with discomfort of knowing that although I love my children and look forward to being with them this summer (the first I have had to just "be" in ages), </div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o17MHdHmsfs/UbjScftMnyI/AAAAAAAABmM/HelA_nDHiRM/s1600/bloomsfall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o17MHdHmsfs/UbjScftMnyI/AAAAAAAABmM/HelA_nDHiRM/s400/bloomsfall.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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I feel the blooms falling rapidly from the rose of time's expectation (mostly about how much I was going to get "done" before this moment). </div>
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</div>
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And we all know (in our heads, anyway) that poultry is done and people are never finished. </div>
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<br /></div>
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I think there should be a Buddhist Vegas Casino called <i>The Lotus</i>, with thousands of clocks ticking against a backdrop of empty and silent slot machines (and maybe as entertainment, just a bare stage with a giant metronome in the darkness), just for practice with this particular concept.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Although currently this farmhouse is not an MRI-enabled facility, I feel confident in my hypothesis that the Letgomens light up the amygdala like a 4th of July flambé. Change--or here, the mere<i> promise </i>of change, which is of course present in every moment--is felt in the body. Anticipation (positive or negative), dread, all of it I feel in my gut (surprise!), sucker punches to the old solar plexus, the delightful and mettaphortunate slang for which is, ahem, the "breadbasket."</div>
<div class="p2">
But then I also experience the Letgomens in specific satellite locations: fear, frustration, powerlessness, and rage as a too-full deadweight in my throat--as if my gullet is a boa constrictor trying to swallow itself; while grief and loss are subtler, painfully shallow-breathed gnawings under my sternum.</div>
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<br /></div>
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It may not <i>seem </i>like a good idea to dwell in the body like this, but friends, since you are human, it's the only place to be.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Isolating your Let go-tos is a very useful practice. Because, as Ajahn Amaro once pointed out wisely (and it <a href="http://www.dharmaseed.org/teacher/4/" target="_blank">sounds even wiser </a>with his British accent), "You can't really sustain a good fret if the body isn't backing it up."</div>
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<br /></div>
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This means that if you can locate your physical fear [insert other distressing feeling], uncouple it from your mental fear, and then work with unwinding just the physical sensation in the body, the mental part (really!) floats away, flotsam and jetsam style, in the sea of awareness. Then there is peace. </div>
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I cannot stress (ouch--poor choice of words) just how useful this practice is, how effective, and how sanity-stoking and cortisolace-soothing it is.</div>
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It's still a new practice for me. Like 48 hours new, so I will have to keep you posted.</div>
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<br /></div>
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And now, in keeping with time and our not really religious, only temple of the body-mind theme: some Jesus Jones:</div>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/x6zDCfaZpA0" width="560"></iframe>
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<br /></div>
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<i>I was alive and I waited, waited</i></div>
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<i>I was alive and I waited for this</i></div>
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<i>Right here, right now</i></div>
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<i>There is no other place I want to be</i></div>
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<i>Right here, right now</i></div>
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<i>Watching the world wake up from history</i></div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
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<i>I saw the decade in, when it seemed</i></div>
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<i>The world could change at the blink of an eye</i></div>
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<i>And if anything</i></div>
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<i>Then there's your sign... of the times</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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There in your own body, if you're awake, is your sign of all time: the gastric sine wave plus the sigh.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Okay, now I have one hour left. The neighbors texted me (note: I wouldn't have this helpful functionality in a cave) to see if I could meet their daughter, a lovely now-sophomore who has Down's Syndrome, off the bus which drops at the end of the lane I see from my kitchen window. She loves to come to our house and eat and talk. I've often seen her wander over and happily talk to our garden, to our plants, or to animals, to bugs, to sit in the sun, pick a berry, unaware. Make that <i>exactly aware--</i>just unaffected by me or anyone watching. There is no "waiting" for her. She just is. We all come and go. Experiences come into her sphere, no matter where she is, and then she lets them go for the next ones. It's fascinating. I feel sad when she leaves, partly because I know she loves me, but I am not missed when she leaves, partly that she takes this quality with her.</div>
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<br /></div>
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It was lovely to spend just 20 minutes or so with her, but I will tell you my Letgomens were kicked up and here's why: I was observing all of this, <i>and I was</i> <u>still thinking </u>about how I wanted to get back to the kitchen and write about letting go of the way things aren't (instead of actually doing it), clock-watching to see how much time I would have left after she left, before my own kids got off the bus.</div>
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<br /></div>
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And the answer is: the exact same amount of time I have right now. </div>
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I can feel amygdalucky that I can see this, or I can feel fried before the summer even begins.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Now, my children are home, beaming, dirty, hurtling, hugging, loving me, chattering about how wonderful if will be to be together all summer, claiming they want to live with us forever, and could they please have a cherry popsicle, 12 straight pins, and 4 T. of vinegar?</div>
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<br /></div>
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My Letgomens start going: my throat aches and chokes with the time that they will not<i> want</i> to live with me forever, or ask me to gate-keep life's experiential materials, a time when there will not be another Summer Vacation together.</div>
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I had to stop just now, and unwind and unwrap these painful sensations from my most frozen cherry popsicle places-<i>-even though the moment I am about to describe has already passed</i>. It's not <i>real. </i></div>
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Now I go on with my understanding. </div>
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<br /></div>
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"That time" doesn't exist right now.<br />
The time to borrow a cup of sugar is always now, both ways.<br />
We do Thich Nhat Hanh's Hugging Meditation. There isn't anything else to do just now:</div>
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<i></i><br /></div>
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<i>Breathing in, I am so happy to hug my child.</i></div>
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<i>Breathing out, I know she is alive and real in my arms.</i></div>
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This is all we can do with the Letgomens. They point to what's alive and what's real.</div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SucU8O3Rvo8/UbjMaot-LsI/AAAAAAAABlg/l71z6QnTHsw/s1600/BeeBalm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-SucU8O3Rvo8/UbjMaot-LsI/AAAAAAAABlg/l71z6QnTHsw/s400/BeeBalm.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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This aliveness, this body-sense, transforms the discomfort to something red and soft, going amygdalub-dub in the emptiness.</div>
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<br />
Go out and smell the Let It Bee Balm. </div>
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(Also known as Bergamot Juste)</div>
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<br /></div>
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Photo by NellsWiki <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BeeBalm.jpg"><span class="s2"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BeeBalm.jpg</span></span></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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The group will be divided on this <i>Omen</i> allusion, and this is okay with me. I've lost Facebook Friends, Roman Catholics, and Countrymen over far less caustic points of misunderstanding. </div>
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Because it is deeply uncomfortable for most people to stay neutral and aware during any of the following:</div>
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<br /></div>
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1. Apparent vilification of children by someone you expect to be maternal, nurturing, and slaving away over a cool compassion, at all times.</div>
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2. Anything that seems like it's even tangentially religious (like the B-word, Buddhism), even when it's not. </div>
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3. Conversations with references to films. </div>
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4. Any and all allusions to discomfort, especially when it points to your own. [OTTO (age 7): "WHY do we have to sit with discomfort at the table?!--can't we just do the sitting part?]</div>
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<br /></div>
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See how the common theme to all 4 is "Not What It Seems?</div>
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Letting go of what it seems and shifting to what is really there--clarity--may be the easiest-hardest thing I've ever done.</div>
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And I predict this is the summer of clarity. </div>
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Bring it om.</div>
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<br /></div>
Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-63989035701129125702013-05-21T14:03:00.000-04:002013-05-21T15:05:09.280-04:00Bread & the Buddha Belly: Strolling Through the Bardoughs<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GtqjvO685gY/UZutUjSsSZI/AAAAAAAABkA/Lmo92NXbKco/s1600/IMG_5385.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GtqjvO685gY/UZutUjSsSZI/AAAAAAAABkA/Lmo92NXbKco/s400/IMG_5385.jpg" width="300" /></a></div>
Buddhists will be familiar with the term<i> bardo, </i>referring to a transitional state of existence between two human births. </div>
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<i>This</i> recipe tweaks the <i>bardough</i> to capture the mouth-feel of a critical transformational state somewhere along the spiritual path--one where you're not cooked yet.</div>
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One that's a stretch-turn-knead-pull pain in the bowl, but holds the liberating potential to rise. </div>
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The fun fact is that there are 6 geeky-technical bardo states I've got scrawled on recipe cards from which I cull--but the common flavor of all is this transformative space <i>between</i> the mind (and mindstream) and the body, where all kinds of lovely, terrifying, & burnishing phenomena occur. </div>
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It's a little unnerving; after all: it's between forms. Transform = across form.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Oh yes, I've been in the bardoughs, my friends--I'm there as we speak, reporting to you live.<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Y7-auV5P9eA/UZutO1suY0I/AAAAAAAABj4/biO03NBQQ_E/s1600/IMG_5384.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Y7-auV5P9eA/UZutO1suY0I/AAAAAAAABj4/biO03NBQQ_E/s320/IMG_5384.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
Here, I'm using the term to get at the place in myself in which I know lies the most potential, excitement, <i>and</i> fear: the suspension of rational and physical thought which can <i>only</i> happen for me when I'm not tied to my physical self. </div>
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I've experienced this in serious illness or other liminal states (it's not lost on me that I teach students to limn poetry), such as those brought on by chanting or yoga, that get me out of my head. These bardough states are times of both terror and opportunity--but they are also sweetly yeasty with the potential to rise through these frightening, previously unseen phenomena.</div>
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</div>
<div>
When you're in this kind of state, everything is changing (yes, even more than usual)--you see that you're part of a wondrous elastic process, creating something new, but...bar<i>doh!</i>--you also see that you won't be able to undo it, even if you non-try.</div>
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Sometimes, it feels light and elastic, if proportionally challenged (like a Stretch Armstrong doll); sometimes it feels heavy (but in a good way, like an x-ray blanket) and plain white-bread-uncertain. </div>
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But feeling-wise, thought-wise, and most important for me, self-compassion-wise, it's <i>all </i>got a particular taste of umami-esque kneadiness to it, which I struggle with.</div>
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Mostly, I'm writing this (as I always do) because I want you to see what it looks like when you're <i>not</i> a Tibetan monk, just a regular householder trying to bake it till you make it, with cats and small children and all sorts of timers going off, and cast iron pots and a dogged insistence on forgoing potholders <i>which you really must let go</i> of some day; with, frankly, even darling hipster husbands cycling in and out of the sweetly postage stamp-sized farmhouse kitchen, often wanting more of you than it feels like you can ever possibly bake at a time.<br />
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I want you to hear that on my particular path there are unspoken and unseen dishtowels I sometimes wish were actually <i>there</i> to throw in when it gets really frightening and challenging, but do not.<br />
Not because I'm especially tenacious or noble, but because you can't unwring the bell--or the dishtowel. </div>
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Transmogrified above the peacefoodlove kitchen, what you <i>can</i> see, looking down through the beams and plaster-dust motes, is some kind of whizzing psychedelic synaptic ping-pong, but with dough balls.</div>
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Whether it's a fresh match or batch, be sure that the next day (and every day and every moment that is not Now) you will find odd little balls of air-dried dough that missed an oven of opportunity, now gone cold.<br />
But you can't just take pieces of past dough and try to reincorporate them into some fresh batch of Now, as much as you might want to.<br />
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I know, <i>dammit. </i>Sorry to punch your ego down, but rest assured, mine is right there with yours in this bowl.</div>
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Even a day-old dough scrap won't re-combine: it's<u><i><b> un-work-a-ble</b></i></u>. </div>
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(Chin up, cosmic bakers! I'm pretty sure even Pema Chodron couldn't work with it).</div>
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Little dried-out dough balls can't be kept (despite startling and amusing shapes) on your kitchen ledge shrine. <i>I've tried.</i><br />
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Like I said, the moment you try to stick that particular form in the shrine and contemplate it, your stealth and supple cat (his name is actually Sid, and the kids & I have taken to calling him "<a href="http://www.yogamag.net/archives/1981/joct81/sidmean.shtml" target="_blank">Siddhi</a> Super Powers") will leap up and<i> thwap! </i>your attempts to preserve it right off the ledge and knock it out of sight--yep, right into the bardoughs.<br />
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And when forces seen and unseen are batting your bardough around, (insert feline paw-<i>thwap!</i> sound now) it can scare the doughscrap out of you.<br />
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(If it makes you feel any better, Ram Dass would tell you that dough ball had no place to go and nothing to do, anyway.)<br />
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My point is: the past-kneaded and past-needed moment? (which is <i>not</i> the same as a tradition or a method, though a method can become stale)--can <i>never be</i> humanly combined with the freshness of Now. </div>
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The seams will always show and break apart, like monkey bread (interestingly, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanuman" target="_blank">Hanuman</a> bread doesn't do this--recipe coming this summer).<br />
Always.</div>
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In trying to scrap together the past reality of stale forms and models with the present moment,<i> we</i> break apart. </div>
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Perhaps we have to have our best crimping, pinching efforts, our most valiant finger-dipped-in-warm-water seamings be broken apart, over and over, to see. </div>
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Our sleek and wise cats with super powers pointing with their tails to the real knowledge, which isn't in cookbooks--the kind you finally know and stop self-consciously considering whether or not you know.</div>
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There is really only this moment.</div>
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<i>This</i> moment is "k as in kneaded," um (K)NOW.</div>
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Now.</div>
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If you believe that in the end, the love you bake really is equal to the love you make--and I DO--then you just have to take the uncertainty of it this idea I'm handing you, still warm in my own brain pan, and doughroll forward. </div>
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It's <i>okay</i> to do this, and you must, because what are you gonna do, anyway?--Bardough doesn't keep. In and of itself, the form is of no use, and it all changes anyway. </div>
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Which leads us right back to Now, with its soft, endlessly pliable and uncooked state between past and future forms: the real and only bardough.<br />
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So you can only do the best you can with the dough you've got in the pan where you are, to transform the predicament of the single moment in which you find yourself,<i> using</i> models and forms--like a bread pan.<br />
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Sometimes, as in this case, they make things easier (like creating a uniform surface for your rhubarb preserves and firm cutting edge for your clarity-sharp knife).<br />
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Right.</div>
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I have faith in my methods--mettaphor, wordplay--and I realize it's all just more practice, more cooking time, more time for a stroll. </div>
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It occurs to me that I hardly ever hear that term anymore, <i>stroll</i>. And I think, if you're with me, we might bring it back into fashion:</div>
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standing+roll = stroll.</div>
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Is there a more grounded and noble, once-around-the-back-field-before-dinner posture for a kitchen warrior to practice than a stroll?</div>
Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-16185575807311326532013-04-08T13:45:00.000-04:002013-05-22T08:22:54.816-04:00Tao Te Spring: When the Student Is Ready, the Rhubarb Will Appear<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">Rhubarb is the great <i>ahso</i>. </span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">If it were a mantra, it might be: "And this, too"--surely, one of the most useful of all mantras.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">The first real Spring day & one's rhubarb plant arising embodies the Tao of all things, including all our models.</span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">Models for:</span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">taste (is it sweet, sour, or bitter?), </span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">beauty (is it a glorious bouquet or just technicolor celery?), </span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">safety & ingestion (hmmm...you say you want me to eat the<i> stalk</i>, but you're telling me the leaves are <i>poisonous</i>? [ps: who knew where to stop when she discovered rhubarb?]), </span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">not to mention,</span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">simple classification (well, is it a fruit or a vegetable, or <i>what</i>???). </span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;"><i>Ahso</i>, it's all these things. And more. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">I cannot get enough rhubarb; however, my grandmother Viola (who smiled her small smile of acceptance, saying "ahso" quite often in the original peacefoodlove kitchen) helped condition me towards the taste, which feels like coming to home to the deepest hollow of my crimson heart, and to safety. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">It feels like Love. </span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">And all contemplative cooks--especially the umammys out there--know that really, there are no other tastes but these (despite the different names and flavors): that we are all equally open-mouthed and open-hearted, tongues out, vulnerable to poisonous leaves <i>but willing to try</i>, searching for the One.</span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">For me, rhubarb's uniquely tart and old-fashioned-sexy. It's got a jarring, cutting pie-edge quality to it that I admire it for. People don't expect you to love it <i>that much </i>and to want to talk about it much less grow it yourself, or to be so honored and excited to practice with it. This elicits a curious response.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;"><i>Ahso</i>, it's got a real Dharmic quality to it, that way. </span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">Perhaps you've found that your Facebook friends (and even family) don't really see you anymore, in the so-sheer dirt clouds along this same leg of the path, and you know what I mean.</span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">At the same time it's brazen and dangerous in a sequined, sword-swallowing sort of fashion, rhubarb is just plain comely--<i>especially</i> the poisonous leaves (shrug: old, self-destructive conditioning), </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">and pleasantly sensible in a pie, or a sweet-biscuit shortcake, or in my favorite incarnation: as a soft rivulet of blackberry-rhubarb jam over the Good Bread, buttered and salted.</span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">At some point in the near future, I promise I will share that recipe with you--but it's not...ready.</span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">Rough-chop and throw in all your models about being </span><i style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">ready</i><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;"> in the <i>ahsobriquet,</i> too, while we're at it!</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">When the student is ready, the rhubarb will appear...especially if said student ("Oh, me, me, ME!!!") needs to sit with the discomfort of never, <i>ever</i> being anything close something called "ready"--especially in Spring.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">Ready for the path I'm on, ready for all the digging and tilling and planting ad justplainweeding which must be done, ready for the next scarlet step, my foliage unfurling. Ready to work with it </span><i style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">all</i><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">, as it comes up.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">Maybe there is only "ready enough." </span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">I like "ready enough" because it smacks--tart-sweet rhubarb-esquely--of the Middle Way, doesn't it? </span><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">Gardening note: You can plant your own rhubarb, but you'll have to wait a few years to harvest it. </span><i style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">This isn't the same as it being ready.</i></span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">Once it takes, then it's something you'll find you have a lot of without having to ask; you won't have to be "ready" (a</span><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">sk yourself: are you ready for the sun or to breathe), </span><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">it'll grow seemingly--but just <i>seemingly</i>--wild in your own back yard.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">As it grows, you'll learn to respect, to work with, and <i>to make use of it</i>. </span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit;"><i style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">Ahso</i><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">, there aren't very many questions as interesting to me as "Now how do I work with </span><i style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">that</i><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">?," and the motherlodestone of all questions: </span><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;"><i><b>"Is it useful?"</b></i></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">And <i>that's</i> a question I know how to work with, because r</span><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">hubarb is a methods food, and <i>I </i>am a methods maven.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">I suppose that in the end, no matter what you do, you're only a garden bed: you ready yourself by non-doing </span><i style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">and </i><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">by doing. </span><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">You're as good as your soil and your right effort,</span><i style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;"> and also this</i><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">: you're as good as your patience. As good as sitting on your hands--"and these, too"--and just observing it all unfolding. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">When I was about twenty, I read these words of one of my heroes, John Dewey, and they forever changed the course of my life--as a teacher, as cook, as a spiritual being on a human path: "Start where the learner is and proceed."</span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">And I am still proceeding, and proseeding, twenty years later--right up to this insight which sprouted about twenty minutes ago: </span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">In a far-out way, and with a deep, rhubarb-red bow to Ram Dass (another of my greatest teachers), maybe before you can learn anything (like what to do with rhubarb), you have to start where you</span><i style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;"> is,</i><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;"> and actually Be that which is Here Now.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit; line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">Hmm.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">I just realized that I "learned" to work with rhubarb by recalling the taste I'd known easily and often as a child, but was missing as an adult. I have a few memories of my grandmother paring a carrot or an apple, of picking berries with her, but mostly, it's a feeling that guides me. </span><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">I have the full and open sensation of being completely loved and accepted, of being allowed to try things for myself in her kitchen. Later, when I met my husband (whose own grandmother's love, curiously or not, predisposed him to rhubarb), I found this same taste in my mouth. And "it"--and I--woke up: this need to taste that rhubarb-red love of acceptance, to feel at home in my own heart. So, that's how I cook: like I'm trying to get back there. Several thousand times a day, coming back to where I already is.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">But </span><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">recipe-wise </span><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">(I have a few of hers; they are beautifully written and ingredient-descriptive, with </span><i style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">no actual amounts</i><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">)</span><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">, all I've really got to go on </span><span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">is the <i>smell</i> of love, the ultimate, olfactory construct of memory which has the power to make then, Now. You might say then, that love can transform time without actually <i>doing</i> anything.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">It's pretty simple: I "learned" to make the beloved jam by <i>making</i> the beloved jam (and the Good Bread)--and by watching the look on my beloved's face when he eats it: my heart, reflected. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;">My husband is a very tolerant and wise man, who never questions unabashed Dharma love, or that the rhubarb rising will transform into jam, in time.</span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 17.975000381469727px;"> Jam is a highly reflective surface:</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #b45f06; font-family: inherit;">"We do not learn from our experiences; we learn by reflecting on our experiences." ~ John Dewey</span></div>
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<br />Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-57388115194959111762013-03-30T10:55:00.001-04:002013-03-30T11:17:02.302-04:00Hot Cross Buns, Magnum PI's Grin, & the Anger That Arises in Meditation (w Yin-Tangy, Not Quite White Icing) <br />
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*Please note: I am <i>not</i> including a recipe for traditional Hot Cross Buns here because, frankly, I do not have the inclination these days to come up with a gluten-free version of something I or the people I love do not love. Plus, sometimes we make it worse by ruminating--or even, meditating--on a thing; there's the off-chance that sifting through the images and childhood memories of overprocessed, stale, storebought buns with criss-crosses of white sugar icing really <i>will</i> make me angry. And that is not what cooking meditation is about.</div>
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Maybe <i>anger </i>with regard to meditation<i> </i>is too strong a word--but soooo few people under the age of 40 know this usage of the word, <i>cross</i>, as in:<i> "</i>If you don't learn to just breathe and be in the moment soon, I am reaaallly going to get <i>cross</i> with you, Self."</div>
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The same people who know this kind of <i>cross </i>to bear<i> </i>also have a stunningly comprehensive brain backlog of complete Magnum PI episodes, as well as memory co-eds skipping across their hippocampuses toward get-togethers at The Regal Beagle, where Tom Selleck and/or John Ritter endlessly grin and use "buns" to mean, um, "sit-bones," that I thought I might clarify.</div>
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These people may recognize this feeling (which is just a feeling, mind you!--isn't that comforting?): Sometimes, when we are seeking peace in meditation, what we find is every single obstacle in ourselves to that peace,<i> and they are not external--</i>though they <i>do</i> tend to be exacerbated by other people's non-sitting grinning, I have noticed. </div>
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This includes, but is not limited to: adorable husbands who don't<i> have</i> to sit for so long like you do, who can read <i>Be Here Now</i> once and chirp, "Hey, this is GREAT. I already<i> do</i> this!!"and walk away; children who are busy constructing catapults & launching stuffed animals and uncooked eggs into the kitchen because it's Saturday morning and they want you to play; and simply, your SELF: <i>sitting too long</i>, and having your buns/sit-bones go numb.</div>
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Because, maybe what I actually need to do is stand up and...stretch?</div>
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This type of anger, mostly directed at ourselves and our perceived shortcomings, has a real, well...stale storebought quality to it. You start to sense that it's not real, but a story you're telling yourself about yourself--it's got that exact tin-canned, fakey cinnamon roll icing taste to it. Sometimes your meditation feels stale, too, and once you stand up and stretch a while, you simply discover it's gone away, it's empty, a wasted white sugar aftertaste.</div>
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Okay, I lied:</div>
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Here is a pretty good recipe I just stood up and came up with for non-gakky white icing that you could put on all kinds of good things. Even Hot Cross Buns.<br />
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<b><u>Yin-Tangy, Not Quite White Icing:</u></b><br />
1/2 C. coconut milk<br />
2 egg whites, beaten<br />
1/2 T. agave syrup (more, to taste)<br />
1/2 tsp. potato starch<br />
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This is a very loose recipe (literally and figuratively). It's tangy-sweet. If you're not into knowing where your eggs are from, or uncooked egg whites, it's not for you. However, it's not meant to sit.<br />
You kind of have to use it in the moment, and then go on with your day.<br />
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Note: I didn't intend to make anything this morning, or to post; I just posted yesterday, which is not my usual...um, pattern. The recipe hit me as I wrote, and suddenly I was just whipping it up and snapping one (not 300) picture, and ready to hit "post."<br />
I was suspicious: it just came together too quickly, too easily--and I expressed this concern to aforementioned adorable husband, who grinned and said:<br />
"I never question it when things come easily."<br />
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Ah. There's the fruit or (coco)nut of this cooking meditation, wisdom which may never get stale--but no amount of sitting will get you there until you just experience it standing up.<br />
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That man is really, truly <i>sweet.</i><br />
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Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-74491413089158391672013-03-29T17:26:00.000-04:002013-03-29T19:46:31.437-04:00Yolking It Together: from Play Therapy to Dancing With the Star Wars<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LbuWQiLVB1k/UVX2MlgGWdI/AAAAAAAABdI/wbFxsr_aakk/s1600/IMG_5815.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LbuWQiLVB1k/UVX2MlgGWdI/AAAAAAAABdI/wbFxsr_aakk/s400/IMG_5815.jpg" width="301" /></a>Yesterday I discovered that my son, Otto, has been secreting egg after egg up to his room all this week, attempting to hatch them under a nest of bird-bodied stuffed animals and his blankets. </div>
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When, covered in slippery yolk after a rare attempt at housekeeping (<i>crrrraaack!--</i>I apologize to my husband for both, which are surely news), I asked about his methods, he said: "I <i>know</i> I'm not supposed to be able to incubate them like a mother bird; I know it's not supposed to work, but I just had a feeling about it. Why can't I <i>try</i>?"</div>
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<i>Yeah. </i>Because it was quite a nest he'd made, in the blankets I'd made<i> him</i>,<i> </i>doing what he knew wouldn't work: the sweetest, tenderest, softest place you could imagine cracking open, if you are so inclined. </div>
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My heart understood, or remembered, having no limitations for what "should" be possible. </div>
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I <i>totally</i> get that kid.</div>
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Now, the essence of my 9-year old daughter, Ava, is something different. Her totality hangs in her Easter Egg Hunting outfit: <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqm4riX2P-vrbsSJLIERhb64zoLqwK2dQEXvHPel7lMyzvrjdoJkdvhcvTjrc_MeneCu36iWGvFg4l6Ia8UtSJut66mWHJQFYDascKSI76wmUmUx7AmArQXKgyEYA2pFxalK8uuz9fWRoo/s1600/IMG_5814.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqm4riX2P-vrbsSJLIERhb64zoLqwK2dQEXvHPel7lMyzvrjdoJkdvhcvTjrc_MeneCu36iWGvFg4l6Ia8UtSJut66mWHJQFYDascKSI76wmUmUx7AmArQXKgyEYA2pFxalK8uuz9fWRoo/s640/IMG_5814.jpg" width="480" /></a></div>
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And yet, this is also me. Absent from the shot is the stack of science encylopedias teetering at the feet, the test tubes rolling across the uneven farmhouse floor, the eenciest of Legos calling, "come find me!" to barefoot arches, the pink tin flower hook, hammered & cut from an old barn roof. Also out of eyeshot is the pair of orange and pink camouflaged tights (camouflaged from whom?--the Lorax??), which we cut off at the bottom because, without adequate toe-spread--tights are miserably <i>confining.</i> </div>
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Immediately, the outfit struck me as a "Totalitea Party Dress." That these would be the lightest of threads--those worn when we're engaged in genderless (and selfless and limitless) play.</div>
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With so much verbiage flying about this week over same-sex marriage, and so much in the news about gendered play and toys, it occurred to me that it's we, the supposed grown-ups, who have lost our true sense of sameness. </div>
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Kids understand perfectly, that these are just clothes, and masks, and shells we wear around--that we are all "one in drag," as Ram Dass would say. </div>
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Few things show our age as keenly as our sandbox-deserted sense of play. And for sure, we have lost sight of our childhood right to try-it-out, mix the roles, gender-bend, mix stripes and polka dots, and just <i>play with form:</i><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ILM_7gq9gmU" width="420"></iframe><br />
<span style="text-align: center;">Corky St. Clair is funny not because Christopher Guest is playing him with stereotypical mannerisms, but because he is playing with it </span><i style="text-align: center;">all </i><span style="text-align: center;">(and he's a genius). And because we could all learn a LOT about our discomfort and our self-limitations--about being ourselves--from watching </span><i style="text-align: center;">Waiting for Guffman.</i></div>
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For sure, we've lost our sense of wonder: The understanding that we can do anything because all of this external stuff, all of these worldly trappings, are just weird, itchy threads and cords. And that our real identities are 5-year-old-boy-at-the-pool-buck-naked and free, at home in our hearts.</div>
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As a mom and as always, I wiped a little more sand from my own eyelets this week--and I felt lighter.</div>
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I Griev(ous) this loss of invitations to the great Totalitea Party--where we can do and be it all at the same time. Not from society, with its usual, engraved expectations & letter-pressing conditions, but from<i> ourselves</i>. </div>
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When did we stop extending the invitation to play with the idea of our totality to <i>ourselves</i>? </div>
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When did we stop setting our shiny pink-patent leather aspects side-by-side with the dark, growling stuff under the mask?</div>
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About the time we got up from the Sand Box of our own self-healing--which is, I am finding with shock and wonder, still warm at sunset.<br />
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*<span style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px; text-align: center;">Apparently, yoga (</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 16px;">योग)</span><span style="font-size: 12.800000190734863px; text-align: center;"> really does mean "yolked understanding." This photo was a happy "accident" sent to me by my mind- & heart-yoked friend, Annelies (who has a beautiful and keen lens for such moments). </span></div>
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Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-25308369165429004892013-03-01T20:06:00.002-05:002013-03-02T08:06:46.793-05:00Wordplay, Hot Potato with Mr. A-Z, & the Besaurus: Where Everything's Just Another Word for LOVE<br />
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My top fears as a child were cannibals, mummies, and my throat closing up. Okay--<i>and</i> the fear of our Sun's impending status as a Red Giant; a fear which also (in a great display of the time-bending, cross-karmic palate) keeps my daughter up at night, her tongue glued to the roof of her mouth in cast-iron concern.</div>
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Recently I sat with these fears in my kitchen floor meditations, and a tender insight like a sheet of phyllo dough unfolded for me: these are all fears of consumption--and they are playing out to this day: literal self-consumption [cannibals]; consumption by rigidity into collapse and ultimate emptiness [and okay, maybe I'm afraid I still don't really get Buddhism's emptiness with a capital-E]; consumption by contraction and constriction [perhaps prompted by a General Hospital episode with the zebra of a lady whose throat was closing up, accidentally viewed while my mother ironed]; self-immolation [nothing says fiery consumption like a solar ka-boooooom!].</div>
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This is what I have to work with: my conditioning. </div>
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Shrug. At age seven, I understood deeply allusions to Cassandra: <i>baaaad things happen when you tell the truth, and no one will believe you anyway.</i> So, I found ways to swallow my truth--first with food, then with alcohol, then, even here: stone-cold sober and <i>aware</i> that I am parsing the parsley to a cheery and distracting lifelessness. </div>
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It's funny that I'm afraid of consumption of the self, when I know (at least much of the time) that the self is not who I really am. What is there to fear about things just as they are? Fear of expressing myself. Not "myself"--fear of expressing what is simply there.</div>
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Later on, after I discovered writing, my fear expanded like the Universe to become fear of not finding just the right word, in the right place, at the right time: <i>lexinexichronophobia</i>.</div>
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Perhaps, stylus paralysis is really the fear of having to some day eat my words--or being consumed by them--should they be the "wrong ones." </div>
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Being afraid of the wrong word is a dreadful raisin d'être, let me tell you.</div>
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It's true that a conscious life can be consuming. For an earnest and still fairly new meditator with just enough zest for the brain science to know when she's choosing a path for herself that is not so neurally groovy, even the most basic, groceryrun-of-the-mill decisions can feel like a challenge to do it right-mindfully (and thus, there is an implied <i>wrong</i>-mindfully): "paper or neuroplastic?" Sigh.</div>
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And yet, a huge part of me longs <b>to<i> be</i> consumed by it</b>, exactly and totally. To dissolve myself completely in the path, to jump into the Insych--er-ator of practice.</div>
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But jump in the Insych--er-ator of Love & practice you realize that, not only is there no ground to land on (not to mention no grinding up), no parachute, and no actual jumper, there are no blades waiting for you, either. </div>
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If only it were so easy to dispose of the <a href="http://www.rickhanson.net/your-wise-brain/how-your-brain-makes-you-easily-intimidated" target="_blank">negativity bias!</a><br />
So...what is there to be so afraid of?</div>
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As you can see, my mind is like a cosmic kitchen sink that never "empties." </div>
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This is very funny, given its daily proximity to the Buddha and where I actually sit.</div>
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You gotta get up off the kitchen floor at some point. Your legs will go numb, and it's a bad idea to attempt to operate the mandoline of insight without full sensation (Note: <i>not</i> what they mean by detachment).<br />
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You'll keep being dropped back onto the floor--and the real world--anyway, to do your householder's work.<br />
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"You're not a monk, Stacia" is leveled like a cup measure, fairly frequently around here, and it's true, I'm not a monk, although the idea of a nice, quiet forest or cave (with WiFi) seems enchanting when this mortal toil of breakfast dishes and lunch-packing and lecture-prepping and neural kitchen rewiring seems endless.<br />
Sometimes I wonder how much earlier I could get up to meditate. Will there ever be a time when a 9-year old master of stealth rhetoric doesn't reel me in from <i>vipassana</i> (insight meditation):<br />
[from the slit of one eye, I see she's got a test-tube] "So, Ma, are you meditating? Because I think I need one-quarter tablet of Alka-Seltzer, a cork, distilled water, and what's the right word for this property?--REACTIVITY? Also, I'm hungry--could you make one of your coffee cakes?"<br />
That's not taking me away from the insight, people; <i>that is the insight</i>. There will be a time when no one interrupts my meditation--when no one needs my specific and delicate crumb of the language of Love. But that time is not Now.<br />
I'm not a monk. I am, at very best--and in my best, expanded aspiration--merely the kitchen god's wife & sous chef. </div>
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I can drop biscuits and cookies, but I can't drop out of the living because I'm not cooked yet, as Ram Dass might say. As much as I might like to live a life up in my head, it is only through this body--specifically, these cook's hands and this GI tract--that I will ever learn anything about loving and serving. </div>
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So. I am trying to live not so much in my head, and more in my heart.</div>
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No, I am not trying, Master Yoda, I am actually <i>doing</i>. </div>
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I like big books and I will not lie. They live in squirrel piles around our house. Words, pages, phrases, and a haze of ink like a dried berry stain all comfort me--or they <i>have always</i> comforted me all my life. You see, this is part occupational hazard <i>and part conditioning to let go of</i>. Like what worked in the past.<br />
Recently, I've discovered that I, who always believed myself to be skillfully feeling feelings--am only<i> describing</i> them. Putting boxes (and other shapes) around them, to contain them--and make some space between my self and them. Mettāthud; sizzle: that's the sound of the astral plane hitting the causal pan. </div>
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I have a pantry of half-finished posts, dishes made with great love and thought, and recipes that are going unshared--they're just too complex to be digested, even by me. You can whip yourself into a real frenzy trying to find the right word. And then, like a cosmic, comic game of Hot Potato, the music stops and you aren't wearing pot holders (okay, I never wear pot holders).</div>
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There <i>is</i> no right word, just as there is no wrong word--and perhaps there are only digraphs and diphthongs, spoken with either love & right effort or greed, hatred, and delusion. </div>
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Maybe they're just words (holy smoke point, did I just<i> say</i> that???).</div>
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Perhaps the real fear, which is just an illusion is this: What would happen if I passed on perfection and ate my heart out? If I allowed it?</div>
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There is no perfect one as a separate entity, because it's all the perfect One. And a whole lotta space. One beautiful bowl, empty and available to be filled and filled again with new delicacies, all the flavors of the only nourishment there really is: Love. </div>
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Surely surely, this is what Ram Dass meant when he said there are 10,000 horrible demons--and dishes!--and 10,000 beautiful ones. The master recipe, one you maybe only need a word to help you remember & don't<i> have</i> to write down, is Love. And what Neem Karoli Baba, Maharaj-ji, was telling for sure <i>me</i> when he said: Love everyone, and feed them. (I feel the "Don't choke them" is strongly implied here).</div>
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In a playful moment, I picked that book up off the squirrel pile, <i>Thought and Statement</i>. I didn't think, state, <i>or</i> read it, I <i>consumed</i> it--just what I'd been so afraid of. I used my ever-handy X-acto knife and I cut out the heart, stuck out my arm & gingersnapped this photo. </div>
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I just guessed.</div>
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Look where the opening is: my throat chakra, the seat of spiritual communication, my gullet, my voice.</div>
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Suddenly, one word rose out of my heart and up into my throat and mind (bottom oven rack-up processing, for once): <i><b>Besaurus</b></i>. Not the word itself but the perfect essence of a word, soft and fragrant, full as bread baking. Right there in my throat.</div>
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The same place that closes up in me first when I am in pain, when I say NO to who I am really am and to the Universe--an ache that is choking (to this day, I can't wear turtlenecks) gagging, a bone in the throat.</div>
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But when I look again, I see that moment in the story of who I think I am has already passed. My conditioning holds no real substance or sustenance, and that a B(one) in the Throat is really just a challenge to "B One in the Throat." </div>
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Oh, yeah. </div>
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So that's the new blog, <a href="http://www.besaurus.com/" target="_blank">Besaurus</a>. It's the <i>tapas</i> (which I guess is Foodskrit for "small plate of purifying fire") of Peacefoodlove. Besaurus: Where Everything is Just Another Word for Love.</div>
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First entry: <a href="http://www.besaurus.com/2013/03/foie-grok.html" target="_blank">Foie Grok</a>, and it's fitting, as they'll be super quick posts, like Grace through a goose.</div>
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It's a place for me to remind you to remind me that no matter how wordy it gets, I really just need to remember--and serve up--the One.</div>
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No matter how many plates I spin, how much hash and conditioned rehash I sometimes forget and sling, I really do have the foolproof recipe. <i>And so do you.</i></div>
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I know the way for me to get back, to Eat at Home in my heart. It only takes one or a handful of words and the just-picked out of the brambles of thin-air feeling: the Stop the car!-- berries-spied-by-the-side-of-the-road feeling. It's <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lila_(Hinduism)" target="_blank">lila</a></i>; it's play.</div>
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You know, I've been trying to write a post about dark matter, Bundt cakes and Jason Mraz's last album for months--but there are too many words in my way. As the <a href="http://atisketatrasketsourcing.blogspot.com/2013/03/jason-mraz-wordplay.html" target="_blank">Wizard of ooh's and ah's and fa-la-lafels</a> himself might agree, it really is all about the <i>play</i> in the<a href="http://youtu.be/ABFtbYKW-QY" target="_blank"> Wordplay</a>. </div>
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I'm no Mr. A to Z, but I <i>do </i>know something about being the Ms. Alpha to Omega 3, when it comes to icing yourself into the corner with your own words. Some day, I'm sure I'll get to the dark of the matter on that post--but for now, I'm after the heart and for me, too, it's all about the wordplay--heavy on the <i>lila</i>. I'll still wear my heart on my plate here for those who care to read, but I'll think less and play with my food more at<a href="http://www.besaurus.com/" target="_blank"> Besaurus</a>, loading up the astral game of hot potato. It's Peacefoodlove, pared down.</div>
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See you, and serve you, there. </div>
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Pass the potatoes. </div>
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Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-50461048115366141912012-08-22T12:03:00.004-04:002012-08-22T12:58:39.332-04:00Skillful Means: Snackshots..."Yet there is time"<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BTzkQl3vFNg/UDT8lkoZZFI/AAAAAAAAA0E/BIRSGu5OV9A/s1600/IMAGE_1E4BB1C3-DEE8-4747-8192-0A317B627F57.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BTzkQl3vFNg/UDT8lkoZZFI/AAAAAAAAA0E/BIRSGu5OV9A/s320/IMAGE_1E4BB1C3-DEE8-4747-8192-0A317B627F57.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yes, this is a Buddha fountain from Target, which I imagined would support my morning meditations and writing. Unfortunately, the ebbing glow of the Clearance sticker and actual assembly has revealed a much louder electric pump than cascade of water.<br />
And I thought NOTHING was louder than the cascade of thoughts!<br />
Non-uniform rocks and mussel shell not included. </td></tr>
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I don't care what Tagore says about Endless Time----<br />
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Okay, that's not really true, I actually <i>do</i> care what Tagore says, about a lot of things.</div>
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A line that always sticks in my craw, usually when I'm drowning in Evernotes and open books and my children's drawings and VIP(rojects which must not be disturbed, even in anyone's absence, not even for a week), tomatoes up the yin-yang, and zucchinis to cleverly use up, is:</div>
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<i>But I find that yet there is time.</i></div>
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Well, it doesn't <i>feel </i>that way. If feelings always pass (90 seconds is the physiological extent of it), then it stands to reason that in 90 seconds I will be afforded a brand new opportunity to construct my relationship to time.</div>
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The only tweets I can come up with recently, perhaps a cross-section of my prefrontal cortex, where it sounds a lot like the buzzing overdrive of this pump, have been: "Not enough time, not enough time, not enough time!"</div>
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This semester I am teaching 3 college courses which I have never done before, and lovingly flinging out the door a first grader and a third. I am also trying to write a book, nurture my contemplative life, figure out what I'm cooking, prepare myself to stack endless cords of wood I know are coming...</div>
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ME (shuddering, tucking shawl over toes): It's winter. I can't take it.</div>
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HUSBAND: It's <i>August.</i></div>
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...and oh, yes, there <i>is</i> that dreamy still-new husband of mine I left somewhere around the house in meditation.</div>
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I really like the ambiguity about the nature of reality and emptiness of that sentence, I do.</div>
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If I am truly the doer. HA!</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I think the diagram might be quite useful with my Reading and English classes this semester.<br />
Meditation (levitation even!) in a handy snackshot! We can find ourselves assembling available parts & expectations into something that doesn't resemble the imagined whole; and isn't going to useful in that particular incarnation. If we are to be skillful (and fluid) we have to let go of the outcome.</td></tr>
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It doesn't matter much, except it does. We have expectations for ourselves that we build around the things we build: like blogs four people are reading, and new marriages, and children, genetically speaking, and fledgling meditation routines. And then, when those things--which are impermanent (changing on a daily basis), need tinkering with, we feel like we're failing because we can't keep up with them as we originally established them.</div>
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Shrug.</div>
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Things outlive their usefulness. The key is to surf the usefulness. The manifestation of the ocean underneath is always changing. I have old grievances about Southern California--and even<i> these</i> are changing to the point where I can accomodate Jon Kabat-Zinn in one hand, and a surfing metaphor in the other. </div>
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Everything in my mind right now comes down to: "Is it <i>useful</i>?"</div>
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You don't have to be a Buddhist to consider skill and utility in all of your means, but this, "Is it <i>useful</i>?," is a great inquiry to pare away rinds upon rinds of things in our daily lives which we <i>think </i>are protecting us, wheel of dharma cheese-style--but actually may be <i>covering</i> us to new possibilities.</div>
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Actually, paring the rind away, we may find we breathe differently, no longer hemmed in by the waxy covering of our expectations.</div>
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SO.</div>
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Even though brevity has always been the soul of quit for me, I'm going to try, where "here" is concerned (though I left that sentence in for a couple of extra minutes, for chewiness).</div>
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Because one of the things that's really coming up for me is that I need to make space on my plate for new things to come in. And also, I might add, space in my photo stream--which is constantly collecting (well, up to 1,000 pictures) shots & thoughts of things to share here. Most of these never make it past Instagram, and a quick tweet or some squirrel piles of ideas for posts. </div>
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Mostly, I never share it (violating the cardinal rule of my own Kindergarten classroom), and so, I never let it go to make room for more to come in.</div>
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It's okay for some things to simply be ideas.</div>
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And it's okay just to sit there and not even take the picture (I'm about 50/50 on this idea).</div>
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It occurs to me I could just post these pictures, now and again, stop saving them for some other time (...time when I could express them perfectly, right?). Similar to the Mantra Morsel, think of these as Snackshots.</div>
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There will be some discursive thought with the cursor...but in the spirit of what I am up for now: </div>
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Less Talk, More Letting Go.</div>
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By The Way (I slay myself), I was curious: there are currently 2,603 photos on my camera roll.</div>
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Which reminds me, fall is coming. Time to haul out the jelly roll pans and make pumpkin rolls--spirals of tender spiced cake and lush internal cream cheese frosting, anyone? </div>
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<b>Endless Time</b></div>
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<i>Time is endless in thy hands, my lord. </i></div>
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<i>There is none to count thy minutes. </i></div>
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<i>Days and nights pass and ages bloom and fade like flowers. </i></div>
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<i>Thou knowest how to wait. </i></div>
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<i>Thy centuries follow each other perfecting a small wild flower. </i></div>
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<i>We have no time to lose, </i></div>
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<i>and having no time we must scramble for a chance. </i></div>
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<i>We are too poor to be late. </i></div>
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<i>And thus it is that time goes by </i></div>
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<i>while I give it to every querulous man who claims it, </i></div>
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<i>and thine altar is empty of all offerings to the last. </i></div>
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<i>At the end of the day I hasten in fear lest thy gate be shut; </i></div>
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<i>but I find that yet there is time. </i></div>
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<i>Tagore</i></div>
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Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-29645839132082547812012-08-03T11:54:00.001-04:002012-08-03T12:04:30.447-04:00Love Coffee Cake: The Universal Baked Good<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Blended families are not really blended families, they are reconstituted, which is absurd, true, and sounds like orange juice. You're highly cognizant, as you stir and stir (either contemplatively or in a frenzy, and I do both) that you are trying to make something good and healthy, but also in some ways pretend it's from scratch. Most important, you're just trying not lose any taste of freshness which can still be found in it.<br />
Yes, it's an issue of freshness, and it doesn't even take any Buddhist sense of that word to feel it.<br />
But this morning isn't about orange juice, it's about coffee cake.<br />
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Coffee cake is a clever and even scientific way (because baking is a science) to hold up streusel topping, which when I make it, is at least as deep as the cake itself.<br />
It's something I make for my family, my sangha of seven, especially when my and-children come, which they haven't in a while.<br />
Oh, there is pain there, seven layers deep. More on this, someday, but not Now.<br />
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There are only a few big secrets in life, and they are not really secrets: love, dark brown sugar, and butter.
And maybe they are all just parts of the same whole, buttressed by each other.<br />
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It's time to get packed for my husband's step-sister's wedding, which means we have to coordinate the stuff of 2 households and 5 children in 2 states 2 hours away, sweetly navigating the obstacles thrown our way. (There will be four sets of parents of the couple alone--what can I say? There's a lot of reconstitution in this group, and in the world at large, for sure.)<br />
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One day, I will make ginormous Wonka-esque gobstoppers for you and we will talk about jaw-breaking obstacles and tension, but not today.<br />
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Let us say that the plan to bring this sangha of seven together always morphs, sometimes maliciously, but <i>always</i> out of our control. Let us say, with screwed-up compassion and courage, that former spouses give us many, many, many opportunities to practice with the dharma.<br />
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It seems absurd, but we have gotten a hotel room, even though we won't be staying together, just to make sure we all have a place to change.<br />
But oh, the room has a kitchen.<br />
With an oven door to be opened. A "light(ness)" goes on.<br />
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This morning, I skipped the sitting meditation because there "isn't enough time"--but I did stop to bake the same coffee cake I would if the kids were coming up here (it's a slow bake on low heat) and watched this, which I have had on one of 15 tabs on my Mac (to my husband's horror) for days:<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/T3ixRqOauq4" width="420"></iframe>
I will just say that I am grateful that I took the time with it, to <i>see</i>:
the clinging of my mind, like the the darkest brown sugar to the hottest pan.<br />
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So, even though I have 14 individual shoes and tangles of bobby pins and flowers and tuxes and sashes and preferred kinds of deodorant and toothpaste to pack, I decided to bake the same coffee cake I would bake if the kids were coming up<i> here</i>.<br />
Because it occurred to me that it's really important that love is portable. That they see that we can love them anywhere--even in dreadfully hectic, materialistic Northern Virginia (it feels right to say this, I grew up there and away from that life).<br />
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They need to know and see that the magic of our time together is not confined to Up Here, in our little world, to our happy little farm-kitchen bubble that always breaks loudly the second their time here is over.<br />
This bubble, I realize, is like a blister. It's only the body's way of dealing with pain, with assault. It is trying to make space where there is horrible friction.<br />
It's all so very hard, this reconstitution business!--and you have to think creatively. Mostly, you have think: <i>How can we make space</i>? For everyone, for love?<br />
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Trust me, I've been trying very hard to make space in my heart for it all. Maybe too hard. If you try too hard, you lose the freshness. And the freshness is where the essence is.<br />
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Meditation and my morning routine can also sometimes be something I cling to. Even cooking, in general. This is an interesting point in my own chain that Ram Dass is talking about. Because food is a big set of links. Food for comfort, food for false refuge, food for non-thought--food to numb.<br />
However, when I cook like this--like this coffee cake--with pure intentions, contemplatively, it <i>is </i>transformative. It is not addictive.<br />
It brings me back Home. Sometimes, I only get a taste--but it's there to return to. I remember.<br />
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Home again, I can greet the day, my heart unarmored (no one ever says, Gee, I think I'll work on a defended heart today, by the way). This is the opposite of putting on one's face to go out in to the world. This is is putting IN one's heart. And baby, Eating at Home is where the heart is.<br />
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So, now there's a coffee cake to take with us to our hotel room, and a cantaloupe. Because that is how I bring home <i>with</i> me.
With dark brown sugar and butter.
And love.<br />
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Only love can bring us back Home.<br />
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It's still worth buttering and flouring a disposable pan, people; that has nothing to do with mess, and it has nothing to do with cleaning up. Like childbirth, like graduate school, like laying a tile floor or digging a garden bed, no one tells you how hard it will be, how messy and how good.<br />
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It's worth the real butter and the knocking the pan around with the flour because it makes The Baked Good slide out more easily. <br />
<i>Ah.</i><br />
The heart wafts open with the smell of cinnamon. I don't even like sweets, by the way. I don't even bake. But I've learned because that is what I have to give, that needs to be given.<br />
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OKAY. That's 14 individual shoes and bobby pins and flowers and tuxes and sashes and preferred kinds of deodorant and toothpaste and...<br />
The color of this wedding is yellow and black. I find that fascinating. The sun, paired with the shadow side.<br />
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I am aware of some fear as I post this--it's full of typos and it's raw. I realize I have been holding back, because so much has happened in the past two months--too much to write, not enough "time"...and, after the last post, I simply did myself in with this thinking:<br />
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<i>Oh no, how will I ever top that?</i><br />
With streusel, of course.<br />
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Oh Baba, Someday Now I'm going to make you a Babka recipe full of my love.
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No videos, no song, maybe next time.<br />
Oh wait, of course: Here Comes the Sun. But you already know how that one goes.<br />
<br />Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-37322921588959991082012-05-31T16:25:00.000-04:002012-06-04T12:10:39.579-04:00Darth Mom & the Death Star Egg: Piece de Resistance<br />
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I'm Darth Mom, and <i>this</i> is the Death Star Egg.<br />
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Mind you, I didn't <i>mean</i> to make a Death Star Egg, and surely couldn't have had I been trying.</div>
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I <i>thought </i>I was making Om Eggs. The intention went something like this:<br />
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"Hey, <i>I </i>know! I bet I could make my own Easter egg dyes (say, out of bark and rhubarb), and <i>then</i> I could take a tiny copper <i>tjap </i>(a wax-holding<i> </i>pen used in batik, which I happen to have several of due to some urgent reason in 2006), and paint a design on each egg (the Sanskrit symbol for Om, ॐ), and <i>then</i> when the kids and I dip them in these barky-food-concoctions, the wax will <i>resist</i> the dye (leaving the symbol eggshell pure), ALL so I can write a post about…(yep, you guessed it)….<i>Resistance!</i>!!"<br />
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Including, but not limited to, the current focus of <i>all</i> of my cooking meditations since my cosmic stumble into Rick Hanson & his <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Buddhas-Brain-Practical-Neuroscience-Happiness/dp/1572246952" target="_blank">Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love and Wisdom</a></i>: my maddening, lifelong <i>resistance</i> to Taking in the Good.</div>
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You see a while back I, who <i>never</i> follow a recipe, set out on the path (cooking meditations are just my particular means), to mindfully and very deliberately use my own mind to change my brain at a structural level <i>for the good--</i>which neuroscience says <b>is </b><i>possible. </i>I know,<i> </i><a href="http://www.noetic.org/noetic/issue-nine-april/self-directed-neuroplasticity/" target="_blank">Self-directed Neuroplasticity<i> </i></a><i>sounds</i> kind of fancy, but for me, this is only my gut sense made manifest, that the most delicious things out there can only be made in your own kitchen And <i>that </i>hits me right where I live--in the <a href="http://www.peacefoodlove.com/2012/03/what-is-mettaphor-and-whats-it-good-for.html" target="_blank">Mettāphor</a>.<br />
<br />
I'm a good cook, but let's just say, I've only begun to learn how to eat at home.<br />
<br />
<div class="p1">
Tell you a little secret: I'm used to being anxious and stressed--like Martha Stewart on speed. But I am not used to <i>feeling</i> fire and gripping pain in my chest, to <i>feeling</i> angry, when my dishes don't turn out. Actually, I'm not used to <i>feeling </i>anything. And I'm pretty sure, if I look closely, that one of my initial draws to Self-directed Neuroplasticity--as well as meditation--was the thought that I was going to mindfully think my way out of feeling, mopping all the evidence off my brow with a smartly hand-sewn synapsekin.</div>
<div class="p2">
</div>
<br />
You know how this goes, right? The Death Star blows up about the time you get all smug about yourself and your clever means. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
And blow it did, during the week when much of the world, regardless of religion, was dying eggs. This may have been the intention and the timing--Om Eggs by Easter--but it was Mother's Day before I had the heart to start writing.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
In one of the most mettathudding sentences ever written (and I only very recently read), Peter Levine said, "To be touched by the revelation of love or scientific discovery is among the greatest and most wondrous blessings of being alive."</div>
<div class="p1">
And, for anyone who doesn't know, I happen to be experiencing <i>both at the same time.</i></div>
<div class="p1">
I think, as the body is his whole thing, Dr. Levine might not mind the riff:"…most wondrous <i>and</i> <i>completely and totally physically consuming</i> blessings of being alive." </div>
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<br /></div>
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<div class="p1">
Here's what the prototype looked like: collapsed, faded, decidedly <i>un</i>-Martha Stewart, reeking of vinegar and impermanence.<br />
<br />
And every time I looked at it, I pounded the kitchen counter (anger at this point still partially feigned) and thought: "But this isn't how it was supposed to <i><b>be</b></i>." </div>
<div class="p1">
Then, if I looked <i>too</i> long on it, a familiar, smoldering feeling bloomed in me: This didn't have to happen. I could have saved/foreseen/fixed/stopped it from happening.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Anger for how "it" turned out, <i>resistance</i> to how "it" unfolded.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Resistance, Anakin Skywalker style, to the way it truly <i>is.</i><br />
And the lingering smoke curl of rumination across the blue horizon of the present moment, wafting the deeper issue: <br />
Because I can't <i>make things work out </i>the way I think they should, there is something <i>wrong with me--</i>or even, wrong with<i> the Universe</i>. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I know, Master Yoda, I really do know:</div>
<div class="p1">
Wars not make one great...especially with one's self.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Every generation sincerely believes it discovered pot, penny loafers, and Star Wars. <i>It has to</i>.</div>
<div class="p1">
Because each of us must discover, <i>for ourselves</i>, our own awareness: our relationship to sensation (both simulated and organic), to aesthetics, and to mythology (implicating in some form, the Divine).</div>
<div class="p1">
One of the jobs of the parent or teacher or friend--and the deeper, perhaps most intimate charge of the lover--is to step back and simply <i>let</i> that discovery unfold, to observe without interfering and without judging.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
And though this was curiously effortless for me in the Kindergarten classroom, it's been true no place and with no one else--especially not myself. My heart knows that this farmhouse and this newly blended sangha--my family, <i style="font-weight: bold;">my life</i>--<i>is</i> my current classroom, but I admit I'd jack a pod racer someplace else--<i>anyplace else </i>at times--to where people do not know me and my dark places, my failed experiments and my Death Star collapses, so well.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
It's not that I didn't "fail" in the Kindergarten classroom, I simply wasn't <i>afraid</i>. Because as intimacy and the possibility of rejection of the core self increases (and the ability to leave each day at 3 pm decreases),<i> so does the fear</i>, which is pretty much the whole thing with the Dark Side, right? FEAR.</div>
<div class="p1">
Sigh, which means my husband sees the worst of it, you know.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
It's painful at a physical, possibly even neurological, level to watch another struggle so hard to learn…especially one's self. </div>
<div class="p1">
And the <i>peacefoodlove</i> kitchen fairly gleams with reflective surfaces.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
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When faced with the collapse of my intention, I did what <i>anyone</i> would do in my situation. I reverted to old conditioning. I dusted off one of my favorite masks and strapped it on tight. And I made the old, Grievous error of pouring the twelfth cup of black coffee when I <i>should</i> have opted for true nourishment. I hunkered down inside the darkness of my mask, hands flexing and spasming over the keyboard, trying really hard to <i>figure it out</i>.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Still, another, wiser (far less dramatic) and more playful part of myself, the fledgling meditator, the seeker, knew instinctively that what I needed was not to hide, but sit. <br />
And so I hung onto The Death Star Egg, and placed it in my kitchen window shrine, just noticing in my morning meditations (and trying to let go of) the way it rankled me. But more, noticing the way I felt felt completely drawn to this failure, curious.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I was waiting for the meanings to emerge because, count your meanings or not, they always do. </div>
<div class="p1">
Waiting for the egg's true nature to reveal itself, for the transformative moment when exactly what it<i> is,</i> right now, becomes better to me that what it <i>was</i> in my mind.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I thought (sigh, thinking again) that the meaning <i>might</i> be "resistance to the way things are." Well, guess what? Meaning-mining is a constantly changing game, and another one of those impermanent states.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Ladies and gentlemen, I am that woman who cannot, and more, <i>will </i>not, just buy the PAAS Easter egg-dying kit, the one that costs a buck at the supermarket. Not if I think I can make it myself. It's true that I'm aesthetically stubborn, with a Depression Era ethic gleaned from my grandmother, Viola, but more importantly, I have unwavering confidence in <i>everyone's</i> fundamental kitchen autonomy: <i>You Can Make It Yourself.</i> </div>
<div class="p1">
(aaaaaand the self-imposed corollary:…"<i>So You SHOULD.")</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
It bothers me deeply (am I the only one who finds páthos in fruit snacks which contain no fruit?) that children are utterly brainwashed by what I think of as "learned & name brand helplessness." My children would explain, very early on (and somewhat apologetically, I'm sure), about our plain t-shirted, fruit snack-less playdates: "Sorry guys [shrug], my mom doesn't do licensed characters," for which I've clearly made a well-deserved exception, here.</div>
<div class="p1">
Children are lulled almost from birth and definitely by school age, by the <i>external</i>. </div>
<div class="p1">
The Western almighty idea that you need to <i>buy</i> something or go out and <i>get</i> something other than what you already have, just to "make it at home." </div>
<div class="p1">
As someone who never even <i>suspected</i> until college that you could get something even vaguely resembling macaroni and cheese <i>out of a box,</i> it just makes me<i>...angry.</i> </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Now, this is exactly the sort of thing which stimulates a kind of chronic, low-grade anger in me: constantly judging my own failed creative endeavors, being offended by "other people" who self-select fruit-snack-filled lives of (assumed) McMindlessness, ongoing tangles with others (often ex-spouses) and what they choose and do <i>that I am in fact affected by, but cannot <b>control</b></i>.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
<span class="s1">Cue up The Imperial March! <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/-bzWSJG93P8" width="420"></iframe></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I've been experiencing Star Wars for the second time now, through my children, and received the complete saga on Blue-Ray for <i>my</i> birthday.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
When the first Star Wars movie came out, it was 1977 and I was six years old, which made my sister Kara three, and the fact that we had to abandon the film during the trash compactor scene utterly understandable…<i>now. </i>I wasn't very happy at the time, and have been lordvadering it over her for the past 35 years, that she "made us" leave because of her fear.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I would like to apologize to her publicly now, seeing the terrible power of my accusation, and what a decent and loving thing it is to honor the realness of another's fears (not to mention, apologize).</div>
<div class="p1">
Also, I now believe that she was wise to innately and accurately perceive threats unseen but r<i>eal</i>, swirling and fetid. Because monsters we can't see--not paper Dianogas (garbage squids) in the bushes, <i>real</i> garbage squids, phantom-menacing us, slithering just under the surface--<i>are</i> legitimately fear-producing.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
This is what my life is right now, becoming aware of what's really under there, and also, what is not; what is real fear warranting real physical response, and what is only vestigial stress-reactivity in my brain. </div>
<div class="p1">
What is actually happening under my own skin <i>now</i>.<br />
What bodily tension is stored and compacted trauma trash to be physically processed then jettisoned, and what is actually necessary, <i>appropriate</i> tension (you <i>do</i> actually have to be rigid enough to sit up for sitting meditation).</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
What is here, everywhere, for sure and for real in my life is the Force, leading me to awareness.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The Force: it's everywhere. And though it's quipped and slipped into lunch boxes and VW commercials, whatever your bag is, baby--be it, Buddhism, brain science or brioche, it's incredibly useful, all the time, precisely because it <i>is</i> everywhere: from how to control (heck, even <i>acknowledge</i>) anger, to how to train and discipline your mind, to how to cultivate table manners in a Kindergartener ("<i>Use the Fork, Luke"</i>). </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
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<i>For my ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is. Life creates it, makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you; here, between you, me, the tree, the rock, everywhere, yes. ~ Yoda</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
You don't <i>have</i> to carry around a 4-inch figurine in your purse to notice, but it's helpful, especially with children (and especially with yourself, when you're being stubborn and not looking). </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Because wherever you go, there it is, somehow standing upright in the bottom of your bag, a little pointier than is comfortable. Saying, take me out. Look deeply. Fit me in. Hold me up to the horizon.</div>
<div class="p2">
Told ya, everywhere.</div>
<div class="p1">
And a fine time to discuss the implications of a city called "Crystal" and the etymology of the word, "Illuminate," the implications, from lumens to luminous beings, to simply <i>lightening up</i>.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
My 8-year-old minutiae-lover, Ava, takes comfort in the details of a complicated Universe, resting easily in the naming of things, ("Ah, Treadwell Droid," she says quietly, during a deleted scene in bonus footage from Episode IV).<br />
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And in the fall, Otto began the spontaneous practice<br />
of wearing one black glove<i> everywhere</i><br />
(um, it's a wool glove, and it's pretty much June).<br />
<br />
A nod to the mechanical hands of both Luke and Anakin Skywalker--dragging it through Starbuck's, the sand box, and the new Palace of Naboo fountain (a resemblance noted, but unintentional).<br />
<br />
Over and over like some 6-year-old version of the Dharma Wheel.<br />
But, I believe, in his own childlike wisdom, he does this out of respect for his own processing of, and reflections on, <i>damage,</i> and the ways we glove it and simply go on.<br />
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<br />
<br />
He draws with that hand.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br />
Lately, Otto's been drawing "Damaged Darth Vader"--<br />
and he makes that distinction verbally, and in these tenderly intricate drawings of the damage.<br />
Of the mask taken away, of <i>what's really under there</i>.<br />
<br />
<br />
I am in <i>awe</i> of what he is doing:<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
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<div class="p1">
He is learning it by rendering it, just like I do, with fat.<br />
<br />
Suddenly, I recall that each time I myself have painted a portrait, I've learned more than I've ever thought possible, and often, was comfortable with.<br />
<br />
Staring so long at someone's eyes, you see the real person. The damage, the suffering, but the beautiful humanity.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
People should draw all of their enemies. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The<i> other </i>thing that's everywhere right now is "The Darth Vader Music," as it's known in our house (yes, it's even my ring tone). It's playing constantly, being hummed, or even being counted out, 1-100, to the tune. I have listened to it approximately 6,000 times this month alone.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Now, this piece (John Williams' <i>Imperial March</i>, exactly), like anger itself, is incredibly powerful and energizing. Whenever we put it on, I go storming around the kitchen and throughout the house like I am ten feet tall. It naturally makes you want to flourish and swoop, charging purposefully over dirty floorboards (and any naysayers in your path). You'll find that it makes even the most humble household task feel magnanimous and purposeful. <i>Thwap! </i>With the horn crescendo, unfurl a giant black trash bag to go pull weeds and plant flowers, and you'll see.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><h4>
<i><span style="color: #b45f06;">Power on, Power off...one leg at a time, no matter your size.</span></i></h4>
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<br /></div>
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Oh yes, your spine will lengthen!<br />
You'll have purpose and power!--BUT...what <i>is that power</i>, and perhaps more interesting, <i>how will you use it?</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The "problem" is that this, unequivocally one of the most beautiful pieces of music I know, is charged with the gleam of a dark, glitter-black, Anakin-style passion which I <i>also know</i>, and it's really hard not to <i>react at a physical level</i> when it's on all the time. Sound is very powerful. Anger has this same swell, in the body and the brain. </div>
<div class="p1">
And I have discovered recently, that nothing fans the flames of your own anger faster or higher than marinating in the glower,<i> except</i> stalking around in your own cape--or apron. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Luke: Is the dark side stronger?</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Yoda: No, no, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Luke: But how am I to know the good side from the bad?</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Yoda: You will know... when you are calm, at peace, passive.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Um, <i>NOT </i>how you feel when <i>The Imperial March</i> is playing. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Not to be gender-biased, but like most women, my preference would pretty much always be the climate of Tatooine over my husband's. And though my extremities are always cold, and I <i>feel </i>painfully<i> </i>cold, if you came up and touched anyplace on my core, you'd find my skin is crazy-molten. As a person, as a temperament, I burn exceedingly hot. I live in a super-high arousal state (often stress, creative hum, or over-thinking) <i>allll</i> the time. This is terrible for the body, with horrible costs, BUT as "super-high arousal state" might suggest, it's also seductive, <i>hot</i>. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
A big part of my kitchen meditations has been noticing physical sensations in my body (because, as one once frozen in Carbonite and vodka for a very long time, there is now a lot to notice)--like the ones I get from my own anger and from my own negative story lines.</div>
<div class="p1">
I happen to feel anger as a rush of juice flowing through me, a searing heat and a burning. The entire length of my gullet becomes a white-hot boa constrictor, but crushing from the inside, <i>out.</i> It's pressure rising, coming through my eyes--I actually do <i>see </i>red ("see" both Anakin and Emperor Palpatine's eyes), and the intense heat pushes up all the way up to the crown of my head, pressing <i>hard</i>. </div>
<div class="p1">
Rising, I think...to get <i>out</i>. </div>
<div class="p1">
Despite these recent insights, I can still revert to some automatic, cyborg heat-seeking missile mode--aggressive verbiage I don't like, but is apropos--because I find myself desperately (and self-destructively), half-humanly panting after the wrong thing, just to try to regulate myself.<br />
Maybe it's just the Lit Major in me that desperately believes <i><a href="http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Everything_That_Rises_Must_Converge" target="_blank">Everything That Rises Must Converge</a></i>.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br />
Sometimes I feel like Icarus, speeding towards the sun on the homemade wings of feathers and wax crafted by his father (probably he used a <i>tjap</i>, probably he had a blog), increasing momentum, rising furiously, but feeling so good in the moment: the big black bird (or cape, or apron), rising up, spreading it's wings, shadowing the ground and all self-doubt.</div>
<div class="p1">
Feeling so powerful (and if you're me, frankly thrilled to feel anything at all after all these years), ignoring everyone's cautions: "Don't fly too close to the sun." </div>
<div class="p1">
Icarus wouldn't listen: not to his own father; not even to Yoda.</div>
<div class="p1">
But can you imagine the power, the feeling?--just before all the wax melted and he went down in a fiery, heavy, false refuge-ball of flames, I mean. How could he possibly stop himself? </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I understand that feeling of anger. Of compulsion. Close to destruction. <i>Playing with fire</i>. Can't stop. Can't pause. Can't even breathe.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
As you might imagine, Otto, at age six, is the resident expert on noise (so important for all younglings to have an area of expertise), including Darth Vader sounds, which, like all accents and yes, like I, myself, he can mimic perfectly. After years of reading aloud and in the classroom, I know that being able to do the voices in the story is a little bit gift, but more than anything else, just a skill called empathy: it comes from being able to just <i>be</i> that person/animal/inanimate object for a moment, and speak from there. <i>This</i> is why children are natural mimics--they're born with an empathic affinity.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
We discovered quite accidentally, here in our very own kitchen, that "doing the Darth Vader breathing" actually has a very strong calm down effect, because it requires you to focus the sound into a long slow exhalation--at least twice as long as the inhalation. And this, I've learned, stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system--the very regulating entity in charge of soothing the fight, flight, or freeze response:<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
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<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
This works pretty well with Otto, but <i>Ava is a different story. </i>I see so much of myself in her--she's wired high and burns hot, too, and has, as they say, a spirited temperament. There are times when I'll see her perseverating on something, ramping up, and coach (<i>plead</i>), "Just breeeeeeathe." But from between clenched teeth, she'll barely be able to spit out the words or have the air to say, "I…don't…<i>want</i>…to...BREATHE!!!" </div>
<div class="p1">
I know we all think that breathing is natural, but you have to practice, and "Hoopering" only works if you actually do it.</div>
<div class="p1">
So, one of the things we have to work with is trying to even set the <i>intention</i> to breathe inside the mask (cape/apron/wax wings/glove), to <i>want</i> to calm down, <i>to not <b>resist</b></i> feeling better--because though very few adults (let alone children) actually examine this, feeling C3PO'd can actually <i>feel </i>pretty good.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i>Even in the absence of real threat, the Reactive core is primed to blow with C3: <br />Concentric, Constricted & Contracted.</i></span></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Now, when she is in a relaxed state, Ava <i>also</i> makes observations like this: "Wow, Mom. Did you ever notice Yoda has three big toes? He must be <i>really</i> stable."<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Because when she, and we, are out of that Reactive mode, <i>then</i> we have access to just this kind of thoughtful observation and response, and a Yoda-toed stability that is our true nature, the essential elements of which we can count on three toes: happy, peaceful, free to be loving and wise. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Insight meditation, or <i>vipassana</i> (of which I'm the barest beginning student), produces, as the name suggests, <i>insights</i>, and let me tell you some of them--chiefly the ones about myself--can be really, <i>really</i> hard to sit with.<br />
Here's the thing: meditation is not about discovering some other unreal, blissed-out state of mind, it's just about discovering, exactly, your true state of mind, however that is, <i>without judgment</i>. Not so skilled with that last part [raises mechanical hand].</div>
<div class="p1">
Maybe that's where the bliss will come from.<br />
<br />
Not resisting this particular insight, I sense that the reason I tend to wind up with the Death Star when I'm trying to make Om Eggs, is that as much as I have been working with this, I cannot yet press the <a href="http://blog.tarabrach.com/2012/05/sacred-pause.html" target="_blank">true sacred PAAS button</a> on my thoughts (or judgments) with 100% reliability--<i>especially </i>not on those thoughts and urges related to what I falsely believe is my struggling, fearful, plate-twirling identity in the kitchen (insert motherhood/spousedom/classroom, etc.): my negative default.</div>
<div class="p1">
I just can't (reliably) shake the negativity bias and the belief--not once that stimulus wormholes its way in from wherever it is <i>outside</i> the brain that thoughts actually come from. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Thoughts may come from "out there" somewhere, but fear? Fear is a call coming from inside the house with faulty wiring--which I have been working on re-wiring through the Self-directed Neuroplasticity, meditation, and cooking. </div>
<div class="p1">
Because, unfortunately, your brain does not learn how to better deal with stress by repeated exposure alone. Faulty wiring and repeated stress exposure simply cause…amygdala fires.</div>
<div class="p1">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-woLy0U9xsdE/T8YXlmO-Z9I/AAAAAAAAAtU/x8KB81ROSdo/s1600/IMAGE_ED13E5E2-35C0-4E0A-938F-9DF2561A3BF7.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-woLy0U9xsdE/T8YXlmO-Z9I/AAAAAAAAAtU/x8KB81ROSdo/s1600/IMAGE_ED13E5E2-35C0-4E0A-938F-9DF2561A3BF7.PNG" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i>We refer to this almond-esque pair of structures in the brain in the singular, <b>amygdala</b>, because<br />it has better mouth feel & it's just plain easier.</i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="p1">
The amygdala, part of the limbic brain, is the alarm bell of the body. It's job, literally, is to stress you (with enough hormones) into the will to survive, into the Reactive mode: fight, flee, or freeze out the abominable, shaggy yellow-fanged, Wampa, say.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The problem is, that this system is Prehistoric, designed to keep us alive (not <i>happy </i>by the way, just alive to reproduce) from when we didn't live very long. The older we get, the more worn out and fritzy this amygdala becomes. It seems like the older <i>I</i> get, the more stressed I <i>feel</i>, the more anxious I become, the less resilient (I fear) I am becoming.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
And, just like <i>The Imperial March</i>, the longer you listen to <i>Clang, Clang Clang (Went the Trolley of Doom)</i>, the louder it actually gets, and the more you keep hearing it--<i>it's stuck in your head</i>.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br />
You become ever <i>more</i> reactive, even when there is no threat at all--even when there <i>is</i> no Wampa, and you're not even anywhere near the planet Hoth.<br />
<br /></div>
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<br />
The problem is,<br />
<br />
in addition to being a miserable, chronically stressed-out existence ripe for disease, where even Ewoks look scary in the wrong light,<br />
<br />
that one day, with our hands clutched to our heads in psychic pain, most of us will reach a point where we will step right over the Good,<br />
<br />
mistaking even our own children playing in the warm laundry and actually <i>trying to help us fold it</i>, for Sand People.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Just to flee the dreadful clanging.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>COUNT DOOKU</i></div>
<div class="p1">
Another new (small) strategy I can share with you is to simply try to make <i>different</i>, positive,<i> </i>and louder noise than your amygdala whenever you can.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
One day in the car, we were having a very bad <i>everyone'shungry5 pm. </i>This is a very dangerous place to be.<i> </i>In children<i>, </i>I view this state as (a corollary to a well-known adult acronymbus cloud): HALLT: Hungry, Angry, Lego-Losing, & Tired. And though as a mom I try to steer us away from this precarious place, I do get lost in my own thoughts, dilly-dallying by the Clearance end-caps at Target <i>far</i> too often, and this is where we find ourselves: rocketing across town toward home in an old VW Eurovan, going down at light speed with amygdala engine fires.<br />
<br />
Recently, in just such an exasperated moment of mother-of-all necessity, I started counting-singing to <i>The Imperial March</i>--and I did it FOG-UP-THE-WINDOWS LOUDLY. Too young to be truly horrified by me in public, both children simply stopped bickering, stunned, and then chimed in. We were all sucked into it. There was gusto and there was real smiling visible in the rear-view mirrors, and I'll tell you something else: there was <i>joy</i> there. Calming, focusing <i>joy in the moment</i>, the kind that allows you to make it home to a stocked pantry to something nourishing before a <i>complete </i>meltdown.<br />
<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Yi2aqfkW3rE" width="420"></iframe><br />
<div class="p1">
I think this worked for a few reasons, not the least of which is that counting is a simple pleasure (and 1-100 takes a LOT of parasympathetic exhalation), and, revealing one of my own compulsions, it's one I've always used unconsciously, to self-soothe. </div>
<div class="p1">
Even though I'm not a math person, I like the order of it, the way you know just where you're going and where you'll wind up. Eventually.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Except you don't, because no experience is that linear.</div>
<div class="p1">
Awareness is not linear.</div>
<div class="p1">
Neither is anger. And (sigh) neither is this post.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I know that right now, this post may seem light, and linear (um, for me). You've got some happy image of me in my peaceable kitchen, looking you in the eyes with that mock-Darth Vader get-up on, but I will encourage you, as Rick Hanson did me, as we found ourselves "accidentally" sharing a truly marvelous lunch of pot roast & providence, to look past someone's eyes and<i> really see</i> their suffering. Look past their glossy black masks, see past their mechanics and their habitual dark coverings, and just try to see their souls. </div>
<div class="p1">
Look <i>past</i> their eyes, and see their struggle with Dark Side. </div>
<div class="p1">
Mine is anger, of which I have only recently <i>started</i> to become aware.</div>
<div class="p4">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
These cooking meditations on Mindfulness have only made my habits and negative grooves <i>more clear </i>to me (& there's a really fine line to discover, between meditation & rumination).</div>
<div class="p1">
I'm aware that I fear not being exceptional, and so in the past, I've butchered an elk or smelted napkin rings 5 minutes before the guests arrived, comparing myself against some impossible standard derived from extolling ONE attribute in another person, and then generalizing it to find<i> the whole of myself</i> lacking.</div>
<div class="p1">
I'm aware of my urge to create extraordinary things <i>because</i> I feel lacking. </div>
<div class="p1">
Above all, I'm aware that I make things, lest they be made for me.</div>
<div class="p1">
And, I'm aware that the space-time continuum of motherhood somehow often enough bends to accommodate my "projects" (in a way that doesn't overtly affect personal hygiene or make my husband leave me), so that I falsely believe <i>I</i> had something to do with it, with making it yield. </div>
<div class="p1">
With (lowercase) forcing it.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Surely, The Death Star Egg is an example of the way that thoughts we try to strongwill into being--ideas that we may be wedded to secretly (or even <i>not so</i> secretly) on Naboo, simply do not turn out, hold their imagined shape, or even<i> look </i>remotely the same once they take form, released to the Universe at large.</div>
<div class="p1">
I mean, look at Jar Jar Binks. </div>
<div class="p1">
And I say this with new and deep respect for Jar Jar--even tenderness--which we will discuss shortly.</div>
<div class="p1">
The flak that George Lucas got for this character, Jar Jar--childlike, clumsy, flop-eared and annoying as a pee-filled puppy when you just want to sleep--was epic. People, um, <i>hated</i> him (and I do not let people use the H-Word in this house & never did in my classroom). <i>Hated</i> his creation.<br />
Hate, hate, <i>hate.</i> (shudder)</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Clearly, no one is immune to this: having to face the unworkable, having to give up control over even right action or life choices with good-intentioned creative outcomes, <i>not even George Lucas</i>. </div>
<div class="p1">
This may be the greatest, most self-perspective-giving sentence I have ever written. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
So, in the case of The Death Star Egg, what actually happened is that my children went along with me just fine in the concept phase for (intended) Om Eggs, and we plopped about 36 of them in simmering water to hard-boil. </div>
<div class="p1">
<i>I</i> thought I was exercising Obi-Wan-worthy self-control, because I "<i>resisted" </i>the urge ("<i>And</i>…there it is!: RESISTANCE!" <i>Nothing</i> will get you like admiration and sheer relief for easy connections to your personal themes, <i>nothing I say!</i>) to make a separate trip to the store for kale just to make a green dye, quietly lauding my newly flexible thinking (consoling myself is more like it, for getting what I perceive to be the "B" not the "A+") that no one would be the wiser if I <i>just used frozen spinach</i>.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
No one questions me on creative methods around here (which is a gift, and wasn't the case in my former marriage), and when they are politely beseeched (okay, sent) to gather "some of that curling bark that fell off the cherry stumps from the wedding seating," they only turn back in the pragmatic parsec leading out the mudroom door to ask, "How much do you need?"</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I like that a lot.</div>
<div class="p1">
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Approximately eight hours into this project, this was the conversation:<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<b></b></div>
<div class="p1">
Ava (age 8): Hey Mom, why are you cooking wood?</div>
<div class="p1">
Me (age 41): Because I thought we could make Easter egg dye out of it.</div>
<div class="p1">
This was accepted as completely plausible, by the way, and in that moment, I noticed that the "fact" of other people's usual behavior is a nearly perfect place of <i>non</i>-resistance for most of us. </div>
<div class="p1">
Ava: How do you do that?</div>
<div class="p1">
Me: [stirring]<i> I don't know</i>.</div>
<div class="p1">
Ava: [nods compassionately]</div>
<div class="p1">
Otto (age 6): [flys into the kitchen in his Darth Vader mask and long underwear, cuts through the humid, woody air with a light saber <i>Whooomp!</i> ] <i>Hoooo-prrrrrr </i>(Darth Vader breathing noise) <i>Hoooo-prrrrrr</i>...<i>That</i> smells pretty bad! <i>Whooomp!</i> Awkward!</div>
<div class="p1">
Ava [eyerolls] You're in Kindergarten. You don't even know what "awkward" means,<i> literally</i>.</div>
<div class="p1">
Otto: Well, I know what "bad" means! B-A-D. <i>Whooomp!</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
So much in Star Wars is about using power wisely--using personhood, not to mention parenthood, wisely. Using our minds for good, not B-A-D. </div>
<div class="p1">
Star Wars explicitly references the world's wisdom traditions, particularly Buddhism, which I am drawn to--but, let's face it, kids just like it because <i>it's Star Wars, people</i>. It's another galaxy, far, far away, filled with light and sound effects and derring-do (and sure, there's a lot of fighting, which I wish six year-old boys didn't like s'darn much, but all you can do is teach them that a Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, NEVER for attack).</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
It chronicles, so beautifully, our symbiant relationship with all creatures, big, small, and seemingly "Other." </div>
<div class="p1">
Ava [chuckling to herself]: Well, I <i>think</i> when Otto gets a look at the Geonosians in Episode II, he's really going to think twice about stepping on another ant."</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Plus, it can give some real heft to your parenting in moments of desperation. When your six-year-old whines "It's too big. I can't doooo it," you can take a squat, chin-scrunchly stance, and quietly come back with, "<i><b><u>That</u></b></i> is why you fail," in your best Yoda voice. </div>
<div class="p1">
And you may see (for something like the nine seconds I timed, anyway) a sudden sweet--if painful--awareness and reflection bloom.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Well, what happened with the Om Eggs, bobbing there under the reflective surface of the dyes (which lived in various cups around the kitchen for days, leading me to the understanding that although no member of this household will turn down one of my homemade pickles, no one actually enjoys the smell of vinegar <i>nearly </i>as much as I do), is that we kept coming back, peering at ourselves in the different colors, dredging the eggs and checking them. And, lovely and vibrant as these colors were, they <i>just wouldn't take</i>. I didn't want to admit OUR eggs were a pale imitation of store-bought PAAS, but um, that's exactly what they were, and the best word here: <i>pale</i>. You could hardly see the ॐ.</div>
<div class="p1">
So, we added more vinegar (my excessive nature said "more" must be better and more effective.) My thought was that it would set the dye. A LOT of vinegar. And we waited.<i> A</i>n<i>d we waited.</i></div>
<div class="p1">
And then when <i>that</i> didn't work, I started getting angry and added <i>more</i> vinegar. We waited longer. <i>Harder.</i></div>
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These cups sat around for another 7 hours, taking up counter and brain space. The eggs would get darker, the design would show up...and the color would wipe right off with a thumbnail.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
AVA: "On the PAAS box I read at the store it <i>said</i> it should be <i>Heinz</i> vinegar. Maybe <i>that</i> was the problem, Mom. You know you never buy the name brand."<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Despair, Vader flounce, and (after a quick detour to discuss the terms<i> cahoots</i>, and <i>kick-back</i>), <i>Hoooo-prrrrrr, </i>breathe. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I just couldn't let it go. </div>
<div class="p1">
I went to bed at some point, stewing, and when I woke up and fished the shrinkled thing from its acid bath of expectation one more time, surprise! Still no Om, but the egg had collapsed.</div>
<div class="p1">
"Mom, that egg looks just like...The Death Star."</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
By the way, you may be reading this thinking, "Look Stacia, I can't boil water and I don't even try these types of crazy artsy mom-projects. I don't keep vinegar in the house, and frankly, I don't much care for outer space. And since I'm nowhere near being the most influential filmmaker of all time, I'm pretty sure I'm immune to whatever's going on with you. I'm safe I tell you!!--<i>I'm not like you</i>!"<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Um, sorry, but...you R2.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Of <i>course</i> you are. Because y<i>ou</i> are creating your own character (and setting and story lines) all the time through the physical act of be-ing a human being (not so much the do-ing). Just as I am. </div>
<div class="p1">
This is how we learn, the <i>only</i> way we learn.<br />
That's all I've got, incidentally: my entire teaching philosophy after 10 years and a formative crush on Thoreau.<br />
If George Lucas ever decides to plunk Harrison Ford at Walden Pond, I'm <i>sunk</i> (and by the way, I just quivered, the way you do with a crazy good idea hoping someone will follow through on it). </div>
<div class="p1">
Every day is creation; it's an art form. Perhaps the only and the purest one.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
"To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts." ~ Thoreau, <i>Walden</i> </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
And while air quality monitoring is something I know how to do instinctively as a teacher and a mother, I have just realized that not only have I been mad and resistant to the idea that I <i>cannot control the day itself</i>, I've often spent entire <i>years</i> filling my own character's lungs with B-A-D air. Maybe due to over-reliance on my (air) conditioning, maybe because no one ever taught me otherwise. But once you're a grown-up, you can turn blue all you want--ultimately, <i>you</i> have to fill your character's lungs with Good--and for that, you have to <i>choose</i> to open up to the fresh air, and breathe.</div>
<div class="p1">
AND breathe. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I know what you're thinking, and it's okay if there's some smugness or even Schadenfreude in it for you. </div>
<div class="p1">
<i>You're</i> thinking the meaning of The Death Star Egg might be [in your best cynical, pre-awakened Han Solo voice]: "Should have spared yourself the experiential heartbreak and bought the PAAS, kid." </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Ah yes, the prefab box with with single should-sheet of instructions, the little color tablets that look an awful lot like the plaque-seeking, disclosing tablets our childhood dentists forced us to chew up so they could see, very clearly, where the problems were. </div>
<div class="p1">
Sigh, neon magenta problem areas are soooo much easier to address. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>If you end your training now - if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did - you will become an agent of evil. ~Yoda</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i></div>
<div class="p1">
The <i>not</i> so quick and easy path is having the courage to address the hidden problem areas <i>our own bodies</i> hold the secrets of, with little hope of such handy disclosure tabs: </div>
<div class="p1">
The deep and turbid wells (Wells, <i>seriously</i>, is my middle name) of Anakin-acidic disenchantment with accepting life <i>just as it is</i>, the bays of disappointment, the inlets of resentment. </div>
<div class="p1">
The murky, sucking swamps of fear, and the small pools of pettiness and General Grievances, perking away, all the time.</div>
<div class="p1">
Hardest of all to reveal: the deadly lava streams of what can only be called our core molten anger, running far, far below, all the time. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Welcome to my personal lava mindstream: I'm angry. A lot. </div>
<div class="p1">
I catch myself in the bottom of the mixing bowl, and the cords on my neck are as taut and defined as Darth Vader's grille, even when<i> I think</i> I'm relaxed.</div>
<div class="p1">
This may surprise you--it did me.<br />
You're not <i>supposed</i> to be angry (you are also not supposed to wrestle with addiction, or anxiety, or self-loathing, or even disenchantment) when you're a mom. You are<i> supposed</i> to bake cookies, sustain and nourish others--and if you must make a hearty covered dish of your feelings from time to time, well, so <i>what</i>?<br />
<br /></div>
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</div>
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<br />
Flour-on-the-floor (or window) mess never makes me angry.<br />
<br />
("You let them do THAT in the kitchen?!" even laid-back friends say)-<i>-</i><br />
<i>I </i>make me angry.<br />
The Death Star Egg mess only <i>I</i> create.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
So I'm not talking about flour-on-the-floor variety irritation or peevishness, I am talking about Vaderesque anger.<br />
<br /></div>
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Anger at my shortcomings--and my inability to execute what I want to create--but more than anything else, my continued struggle to come home to the person I know I truly am, to the Anakin still-good in me, hard and anodized or not.</div>
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<br /></div>
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What does she have to be so angry about?, you ask--right <i>now</i>, I mean. </div>
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She with the new life? With the like-minded, devoted (and rather undeniably hot) Qui Gon Jinn-esque husband, and the funky farmhouse with the low-tech kitchen full of <i>peacefoodlove</i>, the five amazing children, and the dream job of just learning how to <i>be</i> through cooking meditation?</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Well, for one thing,I thought I had <i>changed</i> my course to the Dark Side four years ago when I quit drinking, and I have spent a LOT of time figuring out how to take off the blank, black mask with eyes like surveillance mirrors in a convenience store--the ones that make you feel guilty even when you're<i> not</i> doing anything wrong.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Ever notice the way someone who feels guilty won't look you in the eye? They'd sooner kill you, then get the slight nod of acknowledgment, made more ominous by the mask.<br />
<br />
Maybe I feel guilty that it's taken me so long to get here and it doesn't go well every night.<br />
I'm like a new restauranteur.<br />
<br />
I never <i>had</i> any anger before (or any other feelings, to my knowledge. I was smooth, shiny & tall (often absurdly mistaken for confidence) and, mask clicked in place, I <i>appeared</i> damage free. </div>
<div class="p1">
We all have our ways of freezing scary feelings like anger "safely" into said Carbonite (substitute "vodka" or "work" or "cleaning") until we can deal with them. </div>
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My best guess is that now that I'm in that relatively safe and loving place I have always longed for, with more and more time at a real living room temperature, yep, they're thawing out. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
And well, you know how you have to be very careful when you defrost something enormous like a giant rump roast or an entire spring leg of lamb. If you try to just stick it on the counter and leave it out to its own devices, it'll thaw, but it will not thaw evenly, and that can be B-A-D (not to mention E-C-O-L-I). Plus, taste-wise, it can turn on you.<br />
You really need time and an ice bath, or space and a slow fridge defrost. Everybody knows this, right? Well, partially due to the fact that our healthcare system is, to be kind, not very forward-thinking in covering many of the tools which would be relevant and helpful to me now (somatically-based therapies like body work, acupuncture, Rolfing, and Chinese medicine, for example), but mostly due to the fact that this is just me and how I learn--<i>in a small kitchen with a crunch for time and a reaaaalllllly steep learning curve--</i>I have been thawing myself out here at home, on the counter top of the <i>peacefoodlove</i> kitchen.<br />
<br /></div>
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And no, I'm not thawing out evenly. In fact, I'm painfully aware of entire numb stretches of my body (I mean this literally) and prickly-hot unbearable places.<br />
<br /></div>
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I always say the thing I love most about Middle Schoolers is that they have no permanent mask, that they can't help but give you everything in the way they think and write because, despite their best intentions, they are developmentally "leaky" (emotionally, ideologically, etc), but <i>I'm</i> the one who's leaky now, and it's a bloody mess on white countertops.</div>
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<br /></div>
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What has been happening is that, in a leaky moment, I will do or say something so colossally unwise with my new feelings, like anger, that <i>Whooomp!</i> I will actually <i>shake</i> from it (this is always with my husband, and always has to do with dredging up the past or straining into the future). </div>
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I am overcome by tidal heat and fury; this juice <i>floods</i> me. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>[But] beware of the dark side. Anger, fear, aggression; the dark side of the Force are they. Easily they flow, quick to join you in a fight. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will. ~ Yoda</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
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It <i>feels</i> like there is no way back from this pull to the Dark Side, because of the "consumption conundrum" (indeed it kind of feels like the flu):</div>
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Even in that moment when I cannot believe how harmful I am being in my anger, to myself and to someone I love so deeply--just draining the soul out of him with gamma rays shooting out of my fingertips and my crazy red-socketed eyes, I feel…powerful, and passionate, and most importantly, <i>safer than </i><b><i>not </i></b><i>doing it for some reason </i>(which I have yet to figure out).</div>
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And then, completely ashamed.<br />
<br /></div>
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Because it's not easy to stop right in the middle of an Evilgasm: <iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/NUrNu8lItu0" width="420"></iframe><br />
(forgive me, but there is no other term)<br />
And, going with the instinctual physical release of stored trauma theory, it is energy seeking a way OUT.<br />
<br /></div>
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And I'm sure Mace Windu (Samuel L. Jackson) noticed, but hardly had time in the midst of being destroyed to make the following Pulpy observation: </div>
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"Check out the big brain on Bad."<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MqvXzoKDEzw/T8YXmnZi9dI/AAAAAAAAAtk/FAi6H_S6ODs/s1600/IMAGE_71A8822A-0684-4855-9CB6-B041A252FD45.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MqvXzoKDEzw/T8YXmnZi9dI/AAAAAAAAAtk/FAi6H_S6ODs/s320/IMAGE_71A8822A-0684-4855-9CB6-B041A252FD45.PNG" width="259" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #b45f06;"><i><span style="background-color: #f7f8ff; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px;"><b>Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body</b></span><span style="background-color: #f7f8ff; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px;">, </span><span style="background-color: #f7f8ff; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px;">20th U.S. ed. </span><span style="background-color: #f7f8ff; font-family: sans-serif; line-height: 19px;">Originally published 1918 (drawing lapsed into public domain)</span></i></span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
There's no particular Jedi mind trick to seeing that the Emperor comes to physically resemble, more and more, a brain---a really scary unintegrated brain. Sure, he's got the <i>powa</i>, but boy, has he got a corpus callosal split going on, between powerful emotional instincts like fear (I don't care <i>what</i> he says, he's not in control) and reason and impulse control (um, not to mention, social graces), and that really <i>is </i>a dangerous<i> </i>conundrum.<br />
This is the consumption conundrum I find myself in sometimes (less and less, but there is no "little bit consumed.")<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Now, if <i>you</i> said to <i>me</i>, in that darkest moment, "But I can't <i>do</i> it. I've messed up again, I just...<i>can't</i> come back home now, my Dark Side is too strong."</div>
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I'd say, with true compassion (understanding that I cannot yet do this for myself)…<br />
"I doubt that very much."<br />
<br /></div>
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The final words of the Buddha are said to be, "Doubt everything. And discover your own light."</div>
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Of course, he is <i>also</i> said to have died from food poisoning, which draws me in deep obligation to the mettaphor, to offer you this modern take:</div>
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"Dare to doubt that the Dark Side is stronger; and discover your own light saber."</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
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Doesn't that sound as easy as slicing through butter?</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
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Butter on Anger, that is.</div>
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Okay, I don't know what "butter on anger" actually means, but I was trying to drive and that's what Siri translated; and, fat-on-fire style, it works here.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Nothing oils up the path to the Dark Side like Butter on Anger: which is that point where you think, "Oh man, I blew it so badly (again) that I can't even be with<i> myself</i>. Fine, maybe I'll just go riding off into that scalding lava sunset <i>all by myself</i>. Screw everything, maybe the Dark Side will take me. I'm so bad, let me be badder."</div>
<div class="p1">
It's fundamental.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Because you can <i>know</i> the anger slip-slide is happening, that you're losing traction on Mindfulness, and yet you can keep right on laying a butter-pat trail in front of you, a slick, silken tractor-beam headed straight for the hem of Darth Vader's cape, which sucks you under its heavy pie crust hem, to fight your way back out again--<i>if you can even summon the will to get back out</i>, and not slink deeper down in.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Ever been inside a darth pot-pie of self-destruction? Yeah, me too: unfortunately it's warm, salty and snug in there, perversely, with enough little bits of sweet carrot dangling at the end of the butter stick to make it seem justified--not Good, justified.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The B-A-D news is that yes, the Dark Side will always take you, but the good news is that so will your <a href="http://www.soundstrue.com/weeklywisdom/?source=podcast&p=2658&category=IATE&version=full" target="_blank">true refuge</a>, your goodness, your Rebel home base.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Because, I'm thinking that it is a bit of a rebellious thing to do to try to come back home, despite all of the story lines and against all the conditioning, everything that tells you you're are powa-less AND out of choices.</div>
<div class="p2">
And that is one of the Emperor's big tricks, by the way: to seduce you into believing that you're just completely are out of choices.</div>
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When in reality you're not out of choices. Well, at the very least, you can <i>always</i> breathe. </div>
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<i>Hoooo-prrrrrr </i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
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Inside, after a few of these Hoopers, I (think) I know: I am still good. No matter how much I have hurt myself or others.</div>
<div class="p1">
Because<i> all moms</i> are Jedi Knights--and dads and anyone else who is a symbiont; an ambient, sentient steward--be it of a plant, animal, pet rock or "just" one's own soul. And that is…everyone.</div>
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<br />
Whether deliberate or intuitive, you're a Jedi, and this <i>is</i> a warrior's path.</div>
<div class="p1">
And it's 6-year-old-whiny-boy-hard sometimes--especially when you no longer drown your sorrows and are trying not to drown your enemies, either (especially yourself).<br />
<br />
<i>When you give in to aversion and anger, it’s as though, having decided to kill someone by throwing him into a river [insert "of Lava on planet Mustafar"], you wrap your arms around his neck, jump into the water with him, and you both drown. In destroying your enemy, you destroy yourself as well.</i><br />
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- Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, "Putting Down the Arrow."</div>
</div>
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<br /></div>
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The Buddha called this human thing of making it worse the "Second Dart": the one we <i>ourselves</i> add to the First Dart, causing the biggest suffering, the worst damage. When we are hurt--and especially when we hurt others (like me, with my anger), what do we do? We rush to draw that Second Dart, that Second Arrow--or, <i>Whooomp!--</i>the Second Light Saber, the one we use to Darth Maul ourselves with. </div>
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We are so highly skilled at turning it back on ourselves. </div>
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So far, I have not figured out how to consistently avoid picking up the light saber and cutting off my other hand when I am angry (or otherwise reactive).</div>
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<br /></div>
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Just when you think your inner Obi-Wan told you enough, that you've revealed everything about yourself, the mirrored mask gleams with this spoiler: <i>Luke, I am your anger.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!</i> </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Yeah, search your feelings, you know it to be true. </div>
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And the resounding truth is, the Dark Side you are resisting? The horrible rage you feel against that "Other?" Is <i>your</i> anger, your rage, your father, is...<i>YOU.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
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Dammit! @#$%^&*()&*!!!</div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Whooomp! </i>Out comes the second light saber: and you cut off your hand to spite your face. Your mask-removing hand.<br />
Your drawing hand.<br />
Your vacuuming hand.</div>
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<br />
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One day, I discovered Otto dancing and vacuuming the playroom with his Darth Vader mask on, and since this cleaning was completely volitional and an amazing sight, I tried not to disturb it with my comments or my camera.<br />
I observed.<br />
What I saw was that the mask wasn't keeping <i>him</i> from being functional in a daily household way AND from feeling--clearly evident in his body--joy. Sweet joy: that place where there's no past or future self or moment, there is only (gratefully borrowing from Rick Hanson once again) <i>vacuuming up the pearls of Good.</i><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Kids are naturally drawn toward the Good like a Dyson, "and they never lose suction"...because children understand that the mask is isn't real, that it's external to, and not part of, their true identity. So they can be playful with it.</div>
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And, unlike me, children never (under ordinary circumstances) purposefully resist the pearls and step on the shells in bare feet, angry with themselves for the mess and the missteps.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
An insight I've had about the mask (which I created from alcohol, from do-ing, and from playing possum for many years), is that all of my rage got trapped behind it, and that the feeling is still living inside my body, a symbiont.<br />
Now, in relative safety, the mask is dropping, but <i>that's</i> actually terrifying too, because behind the mask (and in my entire body) <i>is</i> still stored that Anakin-brand anger: being unable to <i>just accept the way it is</i>--whether that was the death of your mother at the hands of the Sand People, or the drowning of yourself at your own hands lifting the bottle, or simply the soul-snuffing marriage where you were not seen.<br />
<br /></div>
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This device is really enmeshed with my identity now; I <i>can't</i> just take it off so easily. And I absolutely default react by "masking out" in stressful situations.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I always thought that something was seriously wrong with me...<i>disordered</i>, even, that I can do this, "mask out": put it on and be utterly black, numb and inhuman. <i>Gone</i>. In a second.</div>
<div class="p1">
I know it scares others (ask my husband). </div>
<div class="p1">
But my gut tells me now, that Darth Vader, while scary, doesn't embody some evil disorder (borderline or any other)--and maybe...neither...do <i>I</i>.</div>
<div class="p1">
Darth Vader simply embodies...a containment strategy.</div>
<div class="p1">
Darth Vader is what happens when you terrify yourself so badly with your own anger, when you traumatize yourself with the glimpse that the damage in you would kill every living thing and everyone else around you, that you better create something to hold it in.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
With a Mettathud, I see: Darth Vader is not<i> dis</i>order, but <i>highly</i> ordered, creative suffering. <i>Physical</i> reaction to the terror and flying-around (why do you think he has that cape?) feeling.<br />
The groundlessness of one's own anger. This is the concept, by the way: <i>rage turned </i><b><i>inward</i></b>, that I identified with so deeply in Peter Levine's book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/In-Unspoken-Voice-Releases-Restores/dp/1556439431" target="_blank">In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness</a></i>--that I had to stop writing for a while, and work through this pattern:</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
*For this project, you'll need a <i>lot</i> of heavy black fabric, a stitching awl, and a #12 royal glover's needle, a forging hammer, an anvil, and…a true, healing fire! <br />
<br />
<i>Sometimes we have to go right into the fire in order to find our true healing. ~Jack Kornfield</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Everyone knows that Darth Vader doesn't wear black because it makes him look thinner or even to look more menacing. NO. He wears it because black, scientifically speaking, <i>is the absence of all light.</i> Really, he wears black in an attempt to hide from his own goodness, to cloak his own light. And...oof, I get this.</div>
<div class="p1">
Because the pain of knowing--even if you are the only one--that there is still good in you, no matter the feelings, no matter the mask, no matter what you have done…is excoriating.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>This</i> is the complete pain and blackness of being driven from your true home, from yourself, from your own light.<br />
Forget trying to eat anything; the kitchen light's on, but nobody's <i>home</i>.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>There is no fire like passion; there is no losing throw like hatred; there is no pain like this body; there is no happiness higher than rest. ~ from Happiness, the Dhammapada</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
Homeless, there is no rest for the wicked, and that is why.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>All</i> of my get-ups and hang-ups are attempts to counteract impermanence, to ground myself, like self-stitched gravity-seeking black-booted heels desperately grinding into the scary-ass weightless feeling of outer space.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
And the mask--for me and for Vader--is simply a way to cheat certain death, a way to keep living, a way we created so we could still keep breathing <i>with</i> the damage.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I am humbled to say it. I never <i>ever</i> EVER thought I would need to use <i>Jurassic Park</i> or Jeff Goldblum for anything, but I am now glad of it: "I'm simply saying that, uh, life finds a way."</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
And, for me, the way was (and still is) inward.</div>
<div class="p1">
But in a word,<i> empirically</i>, sometimes I get it; sometimes I don't:</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
AVA [in observation mode, several days out: sniffs and pokes the wrinkled, now-flabby Death Star Egg] Mom, Is there calcium in eggs?</div>
<div class="p1">
ME: [protracted pause] Where are you going with this? </div>
<div class="p1">
Yes, if you eat the shells, but if you want calcium there are other sources.</div>
<div class="p1">
AVA: [gentle eyeroll] Well, this makes sense now, Mom.</div>
<div class="p1">
ME: [blinking like a sheep, staring into the sun]</div>
<div class="p1">
AVA: Because vinegar acts on the calcium of the shell and weakens its structure? [looks at me patiently, like I'm a child, then adds] You know, like when you put a chicken bone in vinegar and it rubberizes into a funny rubber chicken bone?</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
The not-so-subtle, smiling subtext was, Mom, you should have known this, you already <i>knew</i> this would happen, and...[insert small Buddha smile], it's really <i>okay</i> that you didn't remember this time.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
This remembering is one of the extreme challenges of reactivity (from just plain failed Death Star Egg anger, to Darth Vader mask-donning, to full-on Emperor rage). We simply can't remember and react at the same time.</div>
<div class="p1">
This is the point: Butter on Anger, where we need to practice cooling down the fires, to get out of, as Rick Hanson says, <a href="http://www.rickhanson.net/just-one-thing/leave-the-red-zone" target="_blank">The Red Zone</a>.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i></div>
<div class="p1">
I know that <i>I</i> get stuck in The Red Zone partly from fear, partly from the Second Light Saber, but <i>also</i>, because staying there in my anger and lapping it up makes me feel temporarily full and powerful--this is the same effect carbs have on me, by the way, a stellar (if extraordinarily temporary) sugar rush. Isn't there some awful energy drink called "Red Zone?"<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I am 99.9% certain there had to be beans or quinoa in Yoda's pot on Dagobah (I'd need some meat, but you get the idea here).<br />
Because when I'm in Reactive mode, I'm absolutely sure my chemistry is also off. Eating some protein, <i>stat</i>, when I'm angry is like having a dopamine IV hooked directly to my brain.<br />
I wish I could get to the point where I am skillful enough to choose wisely every time, to <i>always</i> rather have an egg than a Valium the size of a handball, I do.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Well, here's the thing with this Jedi Warrior's path: it's a process and you gotta accumulate skillful means <i>as you go.</i></div>
<div class="p1">
What did Luke have to do? </div>
<div class="p1">
Shrug.</div>
<div class="p1">
Had to learn control by being in control.</div>
<div class="p1">
Had to learn to cultivate a fearless heart by choosing not to act in fearless ways.</div>
<div class="p1">
By practicing.</div>
<div class="p1">
And by breaking a lot of eggs, I'm guessing.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Eggs are amazing on many levels, metaphorical and nutritional, not the least of which is their almost unparalleled beauty as a simple protein. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Julia Child claimed that the true test of any chef's skill was scrambled eggs (I revere Julia). The issue, she said, and why so many cooks fail in this simple recipe, is too much fire. Her method, you see, was to turn <i>off</i> the fire. </div>
<div class="p1">
The secret of scrambled eggs is clearly resisting our instinct to resist the right action for ourselves. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Maybe, I got to thinking, we could use that long, beautiful, parasympathetic exhale-- <i>Hoooo-prrrrrr--</i>to blow out the fire under our own pans and make eggs.<br />
Get out of the red, and into the green.</div>
<div class="p1">
So, I tried it.<br />
<i> Yoda Eggs </i><i>(Scrambled Eggs and Pesto): </i></div>
<div class="p2">
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<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
CRANIYUMMY INGREDIENTS:</div>
<div class="p1">
<i><u>Eggs</u></i> (4):<br />
Super protein source and full of choline (strengthens cell membranes & precurses the heart-rate lowering neurotransmitter, acetylcholine)<br />
<i><u>Pesto</u></i> (homemade or storebought, it matters not):<br />
contains <b>walnuts</b> (full of brain soothing and boosting omega 3's), <b>olive oil</b> (healthy fat that soothes the brain, the body & may stabilize wonky blood sugar), <b>parmesan cheese</b> (protein, calcium, low in rampy lactose) and <b>basil</b> (an anti-inflammatory and adaptogen, or stress-reducer"--look for my Basilade recipe with Simple (no really!) Basil-Agave Syrup this summer)</div>
<div class="p1">
<u><i>Coconut Oil</i>:</u><br />
previously vilified, virgin coconut oil has been linked to increased circulation in the brain, possibly even Alzheimer's prevention. (I'm a fan of blending butter & coconut oil for taste and function)</div>
<div class="p1">
<u><i>Sea Salt</i>:</u><br />
naturally contains traces of system regulating iodine, without aluminum (an anti-caking additive present in commercially processed "iodized" salt)<br />
<br />
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</div>
<div class="p1">
METHODS:</div>
<div class="p1">
1. You already have a hot pan, a<i> really</i> hot pan: you have "Butter on Anger" (about half a tablespoon)</div>
<div class="p1">
2.<i> Intend</i> to use it wisely</div>
<div class="p1">
3. Whisk a mound of basil pesto into 4 cracked eggs and pour into the pan</div>
<div class="p1">
4. Turn off the heat.</div>
<div class="p1">
5. Step back from the stove. Walk away if you have to (it goes against all reason to leave a pan unattended, but I did)</div>
<div class="p1">
6. RESIST the urge to check, or to touch the hot pan (Ha! I never wear potholders, by the way). </div>
<div class="p1">
7. Close your eyes or softly focus and count to 100, using<i> The Imperial March</i>, as needed. If you can't bear to actually step away from the pan, at least breathe. <i>Hoooo-prrrrrr</i></div>
<div class="p2">
8. Come back, slowly and deliberately, and mindfully fold the curds of egg over themselves until they finish cooking by their own internal heat: they will be light, softly green, luminous and…whole. </div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Green and luminous.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
Look, I know this is another of my empire-strikingly simple non-recipes. But I'm not going to apologize for my offering (another of Julia's mandates); it took me soooo many complicated ones to get here. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
When in doubt about eggs, or anger, simplify. Get rid of the dyes the distillations, the waxes, the tinctures of disguise, the metal implements. </div>
<div class="p1">
Resist complicated methods and simply turn down--off if you can--the fire in the pan.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Thanks Julia & Yoda, and thank you, Ava, who, crying hot, frustrated tears, HALLTed me in my tracks the other day when she said, as we were forced to make a meal in a gas station grocery aisle, "Mom, I just need some PROTEEEEEEIN!!!"<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
And there we found ourselves, staring, no amygda-lie, at a pair of vinegar-lovin', red-red beet eggs.</div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i></div>
<div class="p1">
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<b><br /></b></div>
<div class="p1">
At first it can seem weird and sort of Darth Insidious, the way <i>everything </i>is connected, the way all these guises are the same (person) and it's <i>you. </i><br />
But if you (um, I) can sit with that discomfort, it is possible to be present for its unfolding.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i></div>
<div class="p1">
Because now we must talk about the connections between me and Emperor Palpatine.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div class="p1">
The Emperor (Ian McDiarmid) from the film Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)</div>
<div class="p1">
© 1983, Lucasfilm Ltd. (Please see fair use rationale at end)</div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
There is a point beyond Vader anger, steeped in the acids of rage turned inwards, where you completely lose presence, and from which you cannot come back without help.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
It's Palpable, and it's<i> loud</i>--an Emperoar. It is shaking with undulating melting wax shudders, spitting, and...actually <i>smiling</i> with rage. And it's shrinkled up under a cloak hiding a terrifying secret: the weakness rage puts the mind in.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Beyond full and tall Vader anger, glittering, glowering, there is another entity, and it is empty, small, dull, pasty. Beet red-rimmed eyes that couldn't squeeze out a tear because that would require muscular tension (this is when you leak tears, you don't even cry), a point of collapse beyond hyper vigilance and tension and all possible tightening, like a rubber band stretched past itself, utterly slack. </div>
<div class="p1">
How shrunken and flat, how <i>non</i>-luminous, how dark this place is.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I, who have always been always rigid, with hyper vigilant mastery over every thermonuclear process and contractional inch of my body (sorry, this doesn't translate to actual muscle tone), over every ring of every sphincter system and muscle stretch <i>even in my sleep,</i> am not so sure in those moments if I can even control the basics: not vomit, fall down, or wet myself.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I, who fear loss of control more than anything, have lost it.</div>
<div class="p1">
Collapse.</div>
<div class="p1">
Um, like a star.<br />
An exhausted white dwarf.</div>
<div class="p2">
A Death Star.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
With drinking, the metaphor is sometimes the pickle (and here we are at vinegar once again)--you can't go back to being a cucumber once you pass this point.</div>
<div class="p1">
With stress reactivity, the top of the food chain actually flips to become the bottom in some kind of awesome, circular body logic: in the same way the body turns on itself (or, so it always seemed to me, as I was helpless at the end to a tablespoon of vodka) <i>in order</i> <i>to preserve itself</i>--there is no longer any tolerance.</div>
<div class="p1">
Like the calcium in the eggshell, the bonds of the very shell are weakened beyond any ability or integrity to stay closed anymore.</div>
<div class="p1">
Or (another way to see it): to resist being open to what is true. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
From recent personal experience, I am going to tell you that if you, as a system, reach this point, utter gravitational collapse, you will find yourself too powerless to act in the midst of a full-on catastrophe--whether that's the Death Star blowing up, or a dog biting one of your children during your own dinner party.</div>
<div class="p1">
That is true.<br />
<br />
The good news is that the Universe has always relied on collapse as a creation strategy.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I find the Emperor's end to be terrifying, don't you? So wrapped up in his own reactivity, so weakened by it, that he doesn't even <i>notice</i> Darth Vader, his sudden, masterful presence, closing the synaptic gap, as it were. </div>
<div class="p1">
The Emperor has lost all awareness, and so, his control and his real power. </div>
<div class="p1">
I am overcome, as I write this, because I understand this feeling so well. </div>
<div class="p1">
To become something so hollowed out, so weakened by rage, so empty, that Darth Vader just picks him up over his head, like a dried out christmas tree in the back tree-line, and <i>chucks him </i>over the edge. </div>
<div class="p1">
<i>That's it.</i></div>
<div class="p1">
That moment right there--<i>that scares the crap out of me</i>. I mean, really, that's <i>it</i>?<br />
But because my number one childhood fear is not the black thing coming out of nowhere when you aren't prepared, it's the black thing <i>coming back</i>, I still have to check after the credits to make sure he's really been disposed of. Just to see.<br />
But he has.</div>
<div class="p1">
Helpless as a baby.<br />
<br />
All of a sudden, swaddled up in this insight, I stop thrashing, and I really do see.</div>
<div class="p1">
My reactivity, my whacked-out, clanging warning bell, suddenly feels decidedly <i>female</i> to me--feels <i>me</i> to me. Maybe because I've wrestled with my inner Siren plenty, and because as a mom this hyper-arousal is such a huge part of the job description--to be, literally, a protective siren. </div>
<div class="p1">
Why, even the amygdalae, these two clanging glands, are almond-shaped, just like ovaries. </div>
<div class="p1">
Like...<i>eggs</i>.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Thich Nhat Hanh says, "Anger is like a howling baby, suffering and crying. The baby needs his mother to embrace him. You are the mother for your baby, your anger. The moment you begin to practice breathing mindfully in and out, you have the energy of a mother, to cradle and embrace the baby." (from <i>Anger</i>)</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
This too, is part of the job, I see. To care for myself.</div>
<div class="p1">
I have spent so much time being angry. Angry at myself and at my body, at my <i>mind</i>, feeling it had, has, and <i>does</i> betray me, when really, it was just protecting me all along in the best way it could.<br />
It still is.</div>
<div class="p1">
My <i>mind</i> has been in a state of prolonged contraction, but it has been my <i>body</i> preparing me, pushing me, undulating forward instinctively into some new channel, a space where compassion and change, awareness could be born--Com-passion: <i>with</i> the passion.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
And as with childbirth, the body knows just what it needs to do, to return us to our basic state of happiness, peace and wisdom. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. </i>― Viktor Frankl, <i>Man's Search for Meaning</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Oh yes, there is a space between stimulus and response, and it is the mother of us all.</div>
<div class="p1">
The Padme Amygdala. </div>
<div class="p1">
Between the wise, seasoned and reasoned response of the prefrontal cortex, and the gut-wrenching, helplessly terminal reactivity of the amydgala. </div>
<div class="p1">
I have no idea if any such space exists structurally in the brain, but I do know this space is the lexus, nexus and lotus of our survival choices: fight, flee, freeze, or, finally, collapse into love.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i>Om Mani Padme Hum</i>.<br />
The jewel in the lotus of the mind, heart <i>and</i> gut. The sweet spot which is really this confectionary trifecta.</div>
<div class="p1">
The sweet insulullaby which soothes, "Come back, dear one. You <i>can</i> come home now."<br />
Padme: the mother of the twin parts of us, the wise and unwise, the light and the dark, the loving and the fearful.<br />
This lotus space blooming, opening to hold us with her soft petals, like arms, <i>while we learn</i>. An embrace, holding us until we can birth loving and wise response.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I know this space exists for me, because I feel it in my gut right now as I write this. I know I belong there, in the sliver of space where our basic, changeless goodness resides, our true power, our true nature, shining its pearl-like luster on the Dark Side.</div>
<div class="p1">
I know, because this insight is cool inside my head right now. </div>
<div class="p1">
Luminous beings are we in this cool, sweet space, not whatever crude matter-at-hand, not this crude meat.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Perhaps this space is only the Middle Way in another form (I'm saying this--<i>I,</i> who have resisted moderation in every form my whole life), a way where everything known or understandable actually flips over and <i>becomes</i> the other. Whether physiological or mettaphorical, it's there: the space where light becomes the dark and back again, where impossible things transform in the very push-pull of resistance to them,<i> where we are everything all at once and that is okay.</i> And this sudden feeling of transformation, this circle of lightening, is the Quan Yin to the Clang of the Yang.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
When the clanging stops, I feel an indescribable wave of tenderness for the Emperor (I hope it's not the old urge to fix scary men but hey, there's a <i>tiny</i> bit of that). Yes, there's the baking urge in me, welling up. The desire to ask him what his favorite food is, what cookie he remembers from childhood. I keep thinking, if I could only make <i>that</i> for him, he would <i>remember</i>.<br />
Remember<i> </i>the soft, melting, raw sugar balm of...love. </div>
<div class="p1">
In my mind, I approach the Emperor gently, a cookie in one hand, reaching toward his lips; the other placed softly on top of his head, over the deep crack in his humanity. </div>
<div class="p1">
I wonder if I could close the gap for him that way, hold the disparate pieces together. Hand him a cookie that tastes of something long forgotten, of care, of basic, divine sweetness that is otherwise unnamable. </div>
<div class="p1">
This strange little visualization of compassion for the Emperor suddenly makes my own pain much more workable--not because mine isn't as bad, but because it i<i>s</i>.<br />
<br />
Okay, here's a little leavening for your cookie.<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/uunJ8iynTdw" width="420"></iframe> </div>
<div class="p2">
<br />
As I feel the resistance I have to intruding on your reader's kindness without giving you a sight gag in return, I think that Resistance is just a <i>force </i>(neither good nor bad) making necessary space.</div>
<div class="p1">
Like in the fridge.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
THE GEONOSIANS GO MARCHING TWO BY TWO, HURRAH, HURRAH<br />
<br />
<div class="p1">
A couple of weeks ago, there was this dreadful smell coming from somewhere in the kitchen. And though we took everything out of the fridge and sniff-tested it, we could not isolate the smell. It galled me, throwing away so much that was surely still good, on a gamble to pinpoint the negative, but I felt I had to do it.<br />
The stench worsened.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Having no other explanation, eventually even<i> I </i>started to look askance at the Death Star Egg.<br />
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A cursory sniff across the dishpan revealed it smelled, quite inexplicably and as fresh mussels do, like a clean beach. </div>
</div>
<div class="p1">
The smell (later discovered to be festering cannelini beans, somehow mind-bogglingly concealed & sealed) still <i>smelled</i>.</div>
<div class="p1">
In a few days, I went back to the Egg, still nestled up in my kitchen shrine. </div>
<div class="p1">
And I decided to pick it up.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
When I went to pick it up it crumbled, so light. It fell apart in my palm instantly, like a day-old peony. Eggshell petals laid open to reveal the yolk, now desiccated, seeming to shine from within, luminous, like an uncut and unpolished gemstone.</div>
<div class="p1">
The yellow ochre pearl in my own hand.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br />
But there's more.</div>
<div class="p1">
From <i>nowhere</i>, from inside the egg, like a magician's trick (okay, actually, more like a clown car) ants--<i>hundreds of ants</i>--started streaming out in a line, one stream, one being, one energy, wending and stretching out, across the fragile shell-shards, buzzing softly and purposefully, an energy moving across and <i>with </i>my hand and my forearm, <i>through</i> my fingertips to the ledge where our lovely Buddha statue sits, and right on up the greenhouse sides, across the glass, walking right along the horizon line.</div>
<div class="p2">
Defying gravity. You know, that force we <i>think</i> we understand.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
It was the strangest and most lovely sensation I have felt in a long time.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
In an old farmhouse, losing battles include: drafts, plaster dust, dog hair, and most especially, ants.</div>
<div class="p1">
Try dissuading them from your kitchen and your surfaces once they've found a home there.<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Now, I'm a pacifist, with a child who will go to the mat for minutiae. If Ava could get me to stop the van for a stinkbug crossing the road, she would. But truly, this was a lot of ants. A LOT. Beyond the scope of my grandmother's "Don't worry, they don't eat much."</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Creatures light on Ava--they always have: butterflies, praying mantises, ladybugs, toads, even once, a dove. Because they understand she is trustworthy, and more importantly, <i><b>she</b> knows that she is</i>. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Watching the streaming lines of ants carefully, fascinated, she said (okay, I'll tell you, but prepare yourself, because it's a doozy):<br />
"Oh please, Mom! You can't let anyone hurt them! You can't!--they're just trying to <i>survive!...</i>And...they're nature's recyclers!"</div>
<div class="p1">
I love that at 8, she innately and masterfully employs the zinging, two-tined fork of the soul's plea plus <i>fact</i>.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
I knew instinctively not to take a picture of any of this or try to write any of it down. To pause and let it be. It seems I'm always rushing off for my camera or a pencil, and there are very few moments in my life where I am truly aware and not an observer, observing.<br />
So I just wanted to...see.</div>
<div class="p1">
Because each of us must be allowed to see, sacredly and intimately, our own awareness. To let the egg of our own awareness crack open, and see what's really in there.To see inside the egg of our own goodness. </div>
<div class="p1">
And then to trust what we see.</div>
<div class="p2">
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<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Munching away in a waffle, observing this whole scene, but very happily otherwise engaged in drawing characters (and surely choosing his own), Otto released the world's most beautiful laugh:<br />
<br />
"Mom, did you hear what you just said?"<br />
<br />
Actually, I wasn't aware I'd made any sound.<br />
<br />
"You SAID,<i> 'That's the <b>Ant</b>-swer'--</i> Get it?" </div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><b>Truly remarkable, the mind of a child is.</b></i></div>
<div class="p1">
(And okay, I can't help it, Yoda's voice was immediately followed by a proud "YES!!! <i>This</i> is the true power of modeling word play!")<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="p1">
WE are the symbionts of the Force we cannot see, but is everywhere, that is bigger than our resistance to it.</div>
<div class="p1">
Still, I needed to see, so I got ants.</div>
</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<i>Without the midi-chlorians, life could not exist, and we would have no knowledge of the Force. They continually speak to us, telling us the will of the Force. When you learn to quiet your mind, you'll hear them speaking to you.</i>―Qui-Gon Jinn, to Anakin Skywalker</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
Um, and apparently you will be able to see them without your early onset progressive bifocals---<i>if that's what you <b>need </b>just then.</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
It was the Force: of the little ants in a great, vibrating, harmonic stream<i>, </i>that hollowed out the egg. And it has the power to hollow me out, too, to make space, recycle me and <i>upcycle</i> me, to some Omega Point where I remember I am whole again.</div>
<div class="p2">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p2">
<i></i></div>
<div class="p1">
Please know that these sorts of insights are always forever happening as the last glass of milk's being drained at the breakfast table, as arms are threaded in jacket-sleeves. as we must run out the door.<br />
With the same hot tears spilling that she once cried revealing her deep fear about our Sun's "impending" status as a red giant, Ava then begged me not throw away the Egg (or the ants) while she was at school.</div>
<div class="p1">
"You can't just throw it away, Mom."</div>
<div class="p1">
Sigh, she's right. I can't--I never can.</div>
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Because I have my own tagline to preserve around here, and it's: "Wait!-we could still make something out of that!"</div>
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<br />
Even if it's only meaning.<br />
<br /></div>
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The ant-swer did just come to me, in a simple sentence with just three words: <i>Stop resisting love</i>.</div>
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Stop resisting my own learning, and how eggshell messy it is.<br />
I just have to learn how to put on <i>The Imperial March--</i>to feel the rush of power, even the darkness and the <i>beauty</i> of the horn parts--<i>and</i> take off my mask at the same time.</div>
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FATHER: Luke help me take this mask off.</div>
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SON: But you'll die</div>
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FATHER: Nothing can stop that now. Just for once, let me look on you with my own eyes.<br />
<br /></div>
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I love the part where Luke nods just slightly then. His eyes are so beautiful, completely comprehending the risk.<br />
<br /></div>
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The risk of dying to the mask and your ego so you can see love, who you really are in others eyes, <i>with your own eyes,</i> all so you can come home to remember<i> </i>your true nature, held in the universal surname, Skywalker.<br />
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Because, "There is... another... Sky... walker…." and it is <i>you.</i></div>
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<i>Skywalker</i>: One who uses his or her time in this life by staying with the training, by LIVING to defend another day of light, by be-ing the impossible, by, ant-like, defying gravity. Being one with the stream, not resisting, vacuuming up the Good in it, entire pearly constellations across the changeless, the vast, the sky.<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
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To see and be seen, that's all anybody wants.<br />
That, and the sweet sweetness of the moment when, unmasked, you might be able to say, <i>You were right, you were right about me.</i></div>
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This is what parenting does.</div>
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This is what love does.</div>
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Love, full Force.</div>
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PS: Although every single thing I have reported here as fact is absolutely true, that my kids really talk this way, that I really put beet eggs on my eyes in spite of my finicky bifocal contact lenses so <i>I</i> can see better, that seriously, I just write this stuff for fun even if no one ever reads it because <i>I need to,</i> I suddenly realize that letting other people see me see is important and here's why:<br />
<i>This</i> is why we have the gift of mettaphor, as humans: to believe our eyes, so we can see what's already there. </div>
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Perhaps also, to positively perturb the system. </div>
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Metaphor doesn't implicate the divine, ladies and gentlemen, metaphor <i>is</i> the divine, speaking through our children and our creative failures. </div>
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JARRING CONCLUSION:</div>
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Okay, I didn't understand Jar Jar Binks the first time around. At the time of Episode I, I was in the habit of drinking at home, secretly, to try to dull my anxiety. Now, my sister (the same garbage squid susser from IV) could always tell (even when <i>no one else</i>--not even my first husband--could), even when I was really quite masterfully, quietly drunk and trying to cover it up, because<br />
<i>she said it was like I had a mask on--</i>and because she said I walked like Jar Jar Binks. </div>
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So, even though my life is so happy and different now, watching Episodes I-III again produces some discomfort--and a l<i>ot </i>of inquiry.</div>
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Sometimes the fruits of inquiry knock you flat (as I was occasionally when drinking), and sometimes, they hold out for much, <i>much</i> longer and surprise you with the gift of insight--thirteen years later.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Jar Jar, it seems, isn't some failure of mine. Some embarrassment, some shame.<br />
He only represents past actions, past ways of being, and the choices which led me here. </div>
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You can think of that as <i>karma</i>, or simply cause and effect.</div>
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<br /></div>
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I just realized that this post is my Jar Jar Binks of the NOW.</div>
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Maybe like Jar Jar, this direction with the blog, this post, this choice, will not make sense to anyone else, or even to me immediately. But I know it is good-hearted; it just wants to help me. And I trust it.</div>
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Because just like Louisa May Alcott, "I am not afraid of storms, for I am learning to sail my ship"--<i>and it's</i> <i>the freaking Millennium Falcon of ships, baby.</i></div>
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<br /></div>
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I have no idea what George Lucas or anybody else would make of these theories (not to mention my pedagogy). And, who knows? Maybe it's all been "done" by other teachers (old and new) over at Edutopia--I did not look, very, <i>very</i> deliberately. Because I know myself. And I give my best <i>only </i>when I'm not comparing myself incessantly against experts or more "educated" opinions (not mention and the old "Drat, I'm sure someone probably already thought that the Emperor represents the identification collapse of an over-stressed amygdala."--<i>That </i>old chestnut).</div>
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It's safe in my beginner's mind, here in the <i>peacefoodlove</i> kitchen, where I sense I belong.</div>
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Anyway, it's <i>memoir</i>, not dissertation, which makes it a tautology--true, with nothing to prove.</div>
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Like every other kid born in the 70's, consciously or unconsciously, I looked at Star Wars, at George Lucas, and up at the sky and thought, "I want to be<i> there</i> when I grow up."</div>
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Apparently, I thought I was "making" Om eggs then, too. I had the right thinking, I did. </div>
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Except there is here.</div>
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<i>Oh.</i></div>
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“Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little...so, let us all be thankful.” ~ the Buddha</div>
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<br /></div>
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And, if you want to know, my favorite line in <i>all</i> of Star Wars, hands-solo down, is no longer "I have a ba-a-a-a-d feeling about this" which I would've latched onto so easily in the past, with my negativity bias.</div>
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Nope, the line--the mantra really--that gets me is, "Search your feelings," (and the sometimes explicitly spoken) "you know it to be true."</div>
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Because I <i>do</i> know what's true for me, and that always resides in how it <i>feels</i>.</div>
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And here it feels just plain right for me to dedicate this to George Lucas. For searching his feelings, my gut says surely, over and over again, <i>and still</i> putting it out there, for letting us see.</div>
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And for "creating" Jar Jar. Mesa grateful.</div>
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PPS: BONUS Universe alert!</div>
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In physics, the symbol (℧), Omega, is used to represent?…Yes, you guessed it, the <i>ohm</i> – a unit of electrical <i>resistance</i>. The Greek character for the final letter, the the be-all:<br />
the Om.<br />
<br />
<i>Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge. ~ Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Omega Point</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
Despite resistance, and your resistance of the resistance, you <i>will</i> naturally continue to rise and converge with the light...<i>and</i> you will also continue to crash land on Dagobah, over and over and over again, for the rest of this life, asking each time, What am I doing here? Claiming it's like something out of a dream.<br />
<br />
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Alphawave to Omega Point, over and over again. </div>
________________________________________________________________________________<br />
<br />
Fair (and deeply respectful) use of Emperor Palpatine's image:<br />
<br />
This image is a screenshot of The Emperor (Ian McDiarmid) from the film, Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (1983)<br />
Source: http://www.nationmaster.com/wikimir/images/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/5/58/Sith_lightning.jpg/350px-Sith_lightning.jpg<br />
Though this image is subject to copyright, its use is covered by U.S. fair use laws, because:<br />
It illustrates an educational article about anger and the brain, which this image represents.<br />
The image is used as the primary means of visual identification and to illustrate this topic for the reader.<br />
It is a low resolution image, making it unsuitable for production of counterfeit goods.<br />
The Emperor's image is not used in such a way that a reader would likely be confused into believing this article is written or authorized by the creator, George Lucas.<br />
It was not replaceable with an uncopyrighted or freely copyrighted image of comparable educational value.<br />
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</div>Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-187820580778682260.post-8223122596642090422012-04-28T11:54:00.000-04:002012-04-29T11:07:29.181-04:00Mantra Morsel: Eat at H(om)e<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mFphH97XqR4/T5vQwcqqMwI/AAAAAAAAAlM/yAArDNVs4Ic/s1600/IMAGE_15A11518-883F-4E79-A865-3AA65A70E0E1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mFphH97XqR4/T5vQwcqqMwI/AAAAAAAAAlM/yAArDNVs4Ic/s640/IMAGE_15A11518-883F-4E79-A865-3AA65A70E0E1.JPG" width="640" /></a></div>
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This is a sort of obscure Paul and Linda McCartney 45 called <i>Eat at Home, </i>which<i> </i>hangs in our kitchen. </div>
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I had it framed for my husband as a gift when we made this kitchen Ours instead of IMeMine. Partly because, let's face it, aesthetically it's pretty darn great on that brick chimney. And perfectly fitting to have in your kitchen when your ethos is homemade over store-bought.</div>
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<br /></div>
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But really? I hung it there as an act of faith. </div>
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Acts of faith are definitely worth hanging high, and revisiting, and looking at yourself in, from time to time.</div>
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I have been thinking a lot about the concept of "Home," mostly because of course I meditate here in this kitchen, and I realized with great pain the other day, taking this picture, that even <i>here</i>, in the undeniable heart of this space, I feel like an outsider. </div>
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An interloper to my own feelings, to my own experience of taste--not <i>all</i> the time anymore--but to some degree, and often.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The Buddha tells us that our true home, our true nature and refuge is nowhere else but here, in this body, in this heart.</div>
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Yet, I almost never feel at home in my own skin. Never have. </div>
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My anxiety, my resistance, my fear, my various ways of coping and numbing to this simple truth of just <i><b>being</b></i> has driven me from my true home in my heart for many, many years.</div>
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Ladies and gentlemen, I'm cooking my way back.</div>
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I guess I am fundamentally...<i>curious</i>. What would it <i>be</i> like to eat at home, within this space, this body this life, this moment, every moment?</div>
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To nourish, to relax the iron sphincter in every part of my body, to take in the good? </div>
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To simply stop...resisting?</div>
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<br /></div>
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You and I both know, like we know when the milk is sweet or turned, that it's time for me (and for all of us), in this body and this kitchen, in this heart, right now.<br />
But it's actually the beginning, "now," and it's messy and unformed, the way dough sticks to your hands and your bowl-self's sides and you think: oh my gosh, this is<i> </i>just <i>never</i> going to come together.</div>
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And still, it does.</div>
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As a couple, Eating at Home, over and over, is the daily (sometimes within the micro-fraction of each second) act of faith that if we create a Home, that if we just keep being ourselves, and using our real hands and minds and hearts to mix and cook these real things with love in--very important!--<i>realtime</i>, to be right here and <i>not</i> out there with things which don't feel right for us--things that come isolated in plastic cells in McBoxes--<i>it will be okay.</i></div>
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That if we just keep opening up (sometime I'll tell you about jacking up the joists on the house, hacking out the studs, and literally opening up the walls to this kitchen--even though everybody said, "That's a bearing wall; <i>that </i>can't be done!"), then somehow, it can't help but be be good. That we can be...a real family.</div>
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<br /></div>
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The<i> fact</i> is, it's not just okay and it's not just good, it's been nothing short of emotional alchemy.</div>
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Let me tell you that with 5 kids ranging from Kindergarten to Learner's Permit, three of whom live <i>two hours away </i>(that's 8 hours in the car for a "simple" visit, often in less than 24 hours), with incredibly complex sports schedules and a whole, whole lot of opposition by those enigmatically flummoxing, (utterly human) outside forces called ex-husbands and wives, that we (<i>I,</i> dammit!) cannot control, still with absurd obstacles and enormous amounts of old-new pain, <i>somehow</i>, it has <i>always </i>been pure magic, from the first day we were all here together.</div>
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<br /></div>
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And what did we do that day we all met? We cooked. Right here. We didn't do anything special.</div>
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We ate at home.</div>
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We were strangers when we rolled out the dough right on this very table--nothing fancy, homemade pigs-in-blankets, I believe (still, what a crazy-intimate thing to do!)--and somehow, by the time we cleaned up the dishes together and pushed the benches back and stood up straight, forever changed, we<i> were</i> a Sangha of Seven.</div>
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Shrug. Look, I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't been there.</div>
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That somehow, there was…even <i>room,</i> despite every single constraint of this tiny farmhouse kitchen (with its as-yet undemolished, unopened plaster walls), is a plain miracle.</div>
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I don't know we were just so in love we were blindly courageous, or not.</div>
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Here's what I think. To have the courage to even <i>start </i>Eating at Home<i> </i>again is some magic.</div>
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To even <i>start </i>investigating just what it would take to blowtorch through the steel walls of the heart, and pick the hundred fearful city-locks, and start pulling out all the long rusty nails on the 2x12's, to be willing to kick up all that plaster dust and discomfort, is brave and takes faith.</div>
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To turn around and agree that it's even <i>possible</i> to come home is the act of faith.</div>
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That faith is the emotional alchemy which is the very key to Home, what the Buddha called "the sure heart's release." </div>
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<br /></div>
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I admit I am fascinated by this picture of myself because it was a moment of release for me, unstaged, an accident. I don't know why I had the urge to take it, but I did not resist.</div>
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In this way, <i>it's a picture of an act of faith within an act of faith</i>, which is is so, so lovely a circular magical thing to have happened, not to mention <i>documented</i>, that my mouth is actually sweet inside saying that.</div>
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Taking this picture, the way I had to hold the camera, for all practical purposes, I mean come on, that's just lotus mudra, right?<br />
The lotus of the heart, gracefully unfolding. <i>This</i> is what it looks like when it's open, <i>even when it doesn't realize it is.</i></div>
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The organic synthesis of all of that is here is an experiment with nothing less than the absolute magic of that new word: <i><b>peacefoodlove</b></i>.</div>
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Kitchen Alchemizing dis-ease to ease, and dis-grace to grace.</div>
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The thing that can bring us back home, the thing that is "doing" this (better said: "undoing this")? Is mindfulness. Mindfulness is, as the tremendous<a href="http://www.tarabennettgoleman.com/" target="_blank"> Tara Bennett-Goleman</a> observes, "seeing ourselves as we genuinely are, not as we seem at first glance as viewed through the filters"--HA! even Instagram filters!--"of our habitual assumptions and emotional patterns."<br />
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Maybe the power of this photo is that it's not about catching myself unaware--it's about catching myself fully aware.</div>
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<i>That</i> is the transformative power.</div>
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There are tribes upon clans who have always resisted having photographs taken by earnest and intrepid national geographic explorers, because they were concerned about their souls being captured, their true natures.</div>
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Look and tell me that doesn't make sense.</div>
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I don't have "time" to be writing this. </div>
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My and-children (so much softer and more accurate than "step-children," don't you think?!) are coming, and the house is a disaster and we have a <i>Hunger Games</i> birthday cake to bake, and edible gold fondant glaze to figure out how to make work in Connor's honor, since that was the magic series of books we discovered together, which turned the act of reading from lead to gold for him. Which transformed him into a <i>reader.</i></div>
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That, and I have a twenty page paper to pull off by tomorrow night (so I am now looking at the clock and thinking about eliminating the actual pyrotechnics on the <i>Catching Fire</i> cake) and pheeeewwwwww!...</div>
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But the first thing I said to myself this morning, before I even opened my eyes was, "resist nothing."</div>
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Including the undeniable urge to look up, resist filters, and to write what I feel.</div>
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The last thing my husband said on the way out the kitchen door to the long drive down there for a soccer game/turnaroundcomeback was, "It will be good, you will be good, it will be magic--it always is."</div>
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And he's right. </div>
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<br /></div>Stacia Trask / peacefoodlovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00274278126394613697noreply@blogger.com1