Beans

From Mary Oliver's Why I Wake Early.

They're not like peaches or squash.
Plumpness isn't for them. They like
being lean, as if for the narrow
path. The beans themselves sit qui-
etly inside their green pods. In-
stinctively one picks with care,
never tearing down the fine vine,
never not noticing their crisp bod-
ies, or feeling their willingness for
the pot, the fire.

I have thought sometimes that
something - I can't name it -
watches as I walk the rows, accept-
ing the gift of their lives to assist
mine.

I know what you think: this is fool-
ishness. They're only vegetables.
Even the blossoms with which they
begin are small and pale, hardly sig-
nificant. Our hands, or minds, our
feet hold more intelligence. With this
I have no quarrel.

But, what about virtue?

From Ursula Le Guin's "Mazes"

Having moved to Portland recently I have found that one of my favorite authors, Ursula K. Le Guin, lives here. So I am re-reading everything I ever read of hers, as well as other authors who write from the perspective of the Pacific Northwest. Haven't posted in a while, yes, I know. In quite serious transition and I haven't yet made it fully here. Yet I would like to share this bit from Le Guin's short story about animal testing, Mazes, about a rat being used to run tests by a human who it cannot seem to make connection with, despite the rat's highly sophisticated language. 

This is a remarkably apt metaphor for people today confronted with sprayed and processed and de-natured food...

"The alien's cruelty is refined, yet irrational. If it intended all along to starve me, why not simply withhold food? But instead of that it gave me plenty of food, mountains of food, all the greenbud leaves I could possibly want. Only they were not fresh. They had been picked; they were dead; the element that makes them digestible to us was gone, and one might as well eat gravel. Yet there they were, with all the scent and shape of greenbud, irresistible to my craving appetite. Not at first, of course. I told myself, I am not a child, to eat picked leaves! But the belly gets the better of the mind. After a while it seemed better to be chewing something, anything, that might still the pain and craving in the gut. So I ate, and ate, and starved. It is a relief, to be so weak I cannot eat."

The Ethos of Mitigation

Check Rachel Laudan's article from "The Gastronomical Reader" at Utne Reader.
"We need a culinary ethos that comes to terms with industrialized food."
"In Praise of Fast Food."

Page 2 in particular explains quite well why we tend to be loaded with ancestral beliefs that organic food is unclean, hard to get, and not as good as processed food, and might even hurt us. Oh - I don't agree with these beliefs, it's just that it has taken centuries to be able to have the luxury to mythologize and idealize all-natural agriculture. Now we just have to make it the "norm," not the exception.


Hey! And while you're at it, check out the shamanic workshop Jon Bredal and I are leading beginning in September:
The Delicious Life.

Eating the Light

From Barbara Marciniak's Family of Light:

  

"Energy exists around you, and if you would let it in, it would cleanse and revitalize your body no matter how toxic the world may be. Applying this concept is a huge test to pass and a gigantic Grand Canyon of an idea to bridge. No matter how toxic the world is, will you detoxify it by creating the most valuable substance in existence: a love that you can generate for free if only you would get on with the task?

We remind you of these concepts because you must be healthy journeyers…Your ancestors had a greater understanding of the body than you currently do. For one thing, they knew that everything growing around them – the green plants, vegetables, and fruits – affected them. They saw the plants as more than simply food to offset hunger or to fill an empty belly.

Everything you grow has a vibration. Some of the vibrations are compatible and some are not; however, you select your food based on how good it tastes and not on its vibration. All plants and animals are vibratory beings, just as you are."

Marciniak has been writing books (channelled by the Pliaidians, the Seven Sisters in the night sky) to blow the mind now for more than 20 years, and this one, although it is a decade old, is no exception. I can especially now hear it's words, as the time has become riper. She simply nails it about the "vibrations" or LOVE of food.

Enchanted Road Food

Well, for the past several days my mom and my two boys have been on the road, driving through the great prairies of the Midwest, from Denver to Wyoming to South Dakota to Missouri to Kansas. Here we are in Kansas, and it is finally time to reflect on the many road foods we've sampled along the way. And, there have been many.

Visitors to the States are surprised and perhaps disappointed to find so many chain restaurants along the interstates. There's another Wendy's! Oh, there's Arby's again! Meh. True, you have to search a bit more to find the authentic local foods which thrill folks in their native places. But they still exist, and they exist in not-so-exotic places outside of Louisiana and Massachusetts - places whose distinctive cuisine is already well known.

I remember reading a guide book to the best road foods in the USA, and frankly, the Colorado entry was a horrifying disappointment. The book recommended Johnson's Corner, up near Fort Collins, for cinnamon rolls. I had never had one, despite being in Colorado since 1972, so we tried one a few weeks ago.

On entering the diner, we noticed a cinnamon roll the size of a hubcap under a domed cake stand. Wow. We laughed and took a picture of it in order to prove its unlikely existence. A pillow of cinnamon rollness. As big as a pillbox hat, and, unfortunately, about as contemporary in its flavor.

Although breath-taking in scope, these rolls were decidedly underwhelming in the mouth. No yeasty scent, a big butt of a roll with simple sugar frosting, nothing to swoon about. Just a large monster of a pastry.We left the excess on our plates. Not one of us was won-over.

Now, seriously, if you want a true cinnamon roll in Denver you must visit Duffeyroll, off Hampden...and there's one in Englewood, too. Awe-inspiring. Several flavors: English toffee, orange, maple. Counter staff is friendly and efficient. A cinnamon roll that can be held in the hand, and the buttery love will melt in your mouth. The kind of cinnamon roll that Granny used to make - at least mine really did.

You can't even see Duffeyroll from the road. You have to know about it, first. Someone has to put you onto them, like being given a secret password to a speakeasy. This may be the secret to the best road food: it is rarely screaming at you from the interstate. It quietly serves on to local customers, never desperate to be discovered, but friendly if you happen to find them.

 Returning to the issue of road food, let me share the highlights with you.

First, we stopped for a bit of snack and leg-stretch in Lusk, Wyoming. My son said it seemed like a place you might grow up in. We went to the local grocery store and mom and I both bought boxes of chocolate Malt o' Meal cereal, which is becoming harder to find, nation-wide. Love the stuff. Stowed it under our car seats. Plus, a cowboy gave me a flirtatious look. An all-around good experience.

Then on to Rapid City, South Dakota. Rapid City is becoming a fun town, lively, with some interesting restaurants and shops along its downtown main street. But first we got caught in the unending box store section of town, until, dazed, we wandered into a Motel 6 whose counter guy put us right: go to the Firehouse Brewing Co for some character and taste.

Go, we did, thank goodness. The atmosphere was stimulating, the decor was homey, a brewpub set into an antique firehouse. Our ponytailed waiter was very friendly, and brought us two of their beers on tap: a lighter version and a bitter. Both very refreshing and tasty. Mom ordered white chili, which she thought looked like barf when it arrived. Yikes. Needs some green. Yet it was delicious, green-chili based, with white beans. Good burgers, tasty burritos. I ordered the ceviche, which was okay but came with tough cornchips and a red salsa that I suspect was augmented with ketchup. No, no. Otherwise it was quite a good meal. The Firehouse would continue to be recommended to us during our stay, more than once.

Wall Drug, South Dakota. Donuts at Wall Drug. These legendary donuts are still the real thing. Even Wall Drug is still the real thing: you can still have your picture taken atop an enormous plaster Jackalope, for goodness' sake. But especially nice is to sit in the polished pine cafe which is lined with Western art, and try the mythic batter donuts done the old-fashioned way.

Frankly, my mother was doubtful. She was sure that the coffee and donuts touted from billboards two states away would be a hideous travesty of their historical glory. Not so. I chatted with the counter staff, asking a girl if they were really home made. Sure are, made at a local home, and brought there, clearly made on vintage donut-making equipment, some frosted with vanilla, some frosted with maple, but seriously: large, tasty, crispy-fried, crumbly, nutmeggy donuts, alongside 5-cent cups of coffee.

I could go on and on about Wall Drug, but please believe me about the fabulous cake donuts. I asked the girl what was it like working at such a mythic outpost of Depression-era Americana? It's great, she cheerfully said - except for the hats they make us wear, to which her work-mates grinned. (Paper, donut-selling hats.) I hear you, sister. I had to wear such a hat when I worked at Bucky's Hamburgers in Lawrence, Kansas, the sort of hat that made it hard for me to look like Madonna, circa 1984, when that was actually a goal to which one would aspire.

Next stop: my Aunt Barbara's place. Two chickens in the yard, cats too, in a corner of Eden in South Dakota. We would never eat the chickens, but their eggs made it into the meatloaf. Trick learned: put the meatloaf on top of a rack over parchment paper in the pan, then the fat all slides away. Also had creamed garden green beans canned by my Aunt herself, baked potatoes, and vanilla ice cream with macerated strawberries from her garden. Food-of-Love. Pure garden food. Delicious home-auntie cooking.

Next day we drove to Mitchell, SD to pick up some legendary pies from a Hutterite shop. Hutterites are similar to the Amish, to outsiders, except they live in South Dakota. We found the signless hole-in-the-wall, once a Taco Tico or some such, next to which was parked a rusting Bel Air, circa 1954. We peeped inside, and checked out the pies at the shop.

Raving (from a personal source) had been done about the crusts of these pies. Mom bought two. We also bought homemade peanut butter cookies and fudge. Peanut butter cookies better than anyone can bake. Creamy, double cream fudge in flavors like licorice, grape, strawberry shake, and root beer. Best. Fudge. Ever. Melt-in-the-mouth. Surprising and delightful flavors. Incredible.

Pies? Not so much. The pecan filling was indeed thrilling but the better-than-most crusts did not convince mom, for whom barely any pie crust can ever come up to the pie crusts remembered from times past. Toughish crust. Should melt in the mouth, didn't. Plus: Uncle found a pit in one of the cherries. Ouch. Don't let that happen.

Next stop: Lawrence, Kansas, whose natural food co-op had grown all up from when I went to university there. Before it was, like, an emptied-out laundromat that smelled of brewer's yeast, and had about seventeen vegetables to buy from at any one time. It was a haphazard affair, but the one place in town to get Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap. The only place to "eat healthy."

Now, my goodness, The Mercantile has been alive since 1974, but now it shiny and fresh and large and well-stocked, even better and more authentic than any Whole Foods out of California. Best foodie/green-magazine selection ever. Fresh-looking, grain-fed meat. Lovely vegetables and fruit. Fabulous selection of stock, well-balanced. I admire their persistence, and admire especially that it is a co-operative. The best example I've experienced of a home-grown, local provider, answerable to the growing interest in green and locally sourced, sustainable food.

For lunch we'd had a salad bowl from Local Burger, a healthy fast food place, in a clean and fresh and lively atmosphere. There you can have a wonderfully large bowl of tasty, all-organic greens and seeds and beets and miso/tahini delish dressing, topped by a locally-sourced, chopped grain fed-burger of cow, turkey, elk, buffalo, pig, veggie or tofu. The meat tasted so clean. Their tofu fries are amazing. You can also get smoothies and other delightful vegan, organic snacks. Plus, we met the owner and she was a lively, enthusiastic woman who looks far younger than her years (which she offered), likely due to pursuing her passion, plus a healthy diet. A nice place, cut from the earth-loving cloth of the superhero future.

Finally, a meal at my other aunt's house: delicious salmon with quinoa salad and golden beets. Wonderful, and the salad went perfectly with the fish. My aunt takes a great deal of time and attention in creating a meal, and her food always tastes lovely and fresh and well-put-together. The golden beets were like eating mellow patches of sun.

How I Lost 60 Pounds Without Even Trying: Part 4

6. I naturally experienced portion control. The smallness of portions in Europe is adorable to Americans, even though the packaged volume of food is actually similar to how things were sized in the US thirty years ago.

Why are portions so much smaller? Why so few pieces in a package? Well, merchandising is scaled to the size of local homes and cupboards. Europeans simply are not conditioned to having huge amounts of things to store in their typically quite small kitchens. Because they interact with the city every day, they can pick up whatever they need daily, and don't have to hoard it. Sure, folks keep extra drinks in their cellars. But in general, everything from bread to yogurts is sized for an average household of 2 or so. (This is an eco-problem by creating excess packaging, but that's another story.)

Let's say I bought packs of four puddings at the store for an after dinner dessert. There are only four in a pack. Each petite portion contains about seven or eight bites of high-quality pudding.

You eat the pudding, and it is gone. It is strangely satisfying to eat a small amount of something and experience it going from being there to being gone. It's over, and if you really enjoy every bite, you experience satisfaction.

There are limits to what people both need and want, and in this case European manufacturers decide what the limits are. Often, they get it just right: one doesn't need or want any more than what comes in each container. I ended up eating much less than I had in America, and generally enjoying it more. There was an end to it, and the end was in sight.

I never had to literally stretch myself to accommodate super-sized portions. I never had to "just get to the end of it." Consumption is not as strenuous in Europe.

Eat These Words

     I don’t tend to read books about food, eating and dieting. But when I have, I usually began by bracing myself. I know I will have to learn a whole new way of being, and conform to this system if I want to experience success, and re-learn which foods I should eat and which I absolutely am not allowed. There is an inevitable loss of dignity and adult self-sufficiency as I am told all that I have been doing wrong. I wonder again if I will be able to whip myself into a whirlwind frenzy of hope blended with enough self-hatred, so that I might try again a new system, revolutionize myself, and become a whole new, slender person. If I just do what I am told, then I may be able to do it.

     Nourishing Wisdom: A Mind-Body Approach to Nutrition and Well-Being by Marc David is a voice of calm and clear reason in the relatively new genre of holistic books about intuitive eating. The author provides a lucid counterpoint to nearly every bit of popular assumption and black-or-white thinking regarding eating that people tend to take for granted. He points out the inevitability of a changing diet with the passage of seasons, years, ages of life, and explains how the body goes through periods of building up and letting go. Desires and longings for food are also affected by mood, relationships, nostalgia and inner attitude. By shedding light on the variability of the human experience of eating, he clarifies how one single diet is in itself a myth, that a one-size-fits-all diet for every person is itself a trap.

     Simply acknowledging this is unique. When most popular thinking about food tries to make food choices ever more concrete, tries to make restricted food certain and immoveable, and nearly criminalize certain diet choices, one can read this book and simply take in a deep breath of fresh air. Slow down, and gather some perspective. Truly, bask in a depth of wisdom.

     Marc David goes on to gently clarify the fascism (my word) of diet programs, that accepting a diet is the same as accepting the author’s entire worldview. The possibility that the reader has their own wants, needs and personal wisdom never comes into question. To follow a diet, one gives up their own interior knowing, swallowing whole a completely foreign way of thinking.

     David states that food itself is neutral, and that moralizing about it results in both lending a restricted food a shine of irresistibility and it represses the individual’s personal process of gathering information about food; it shuts down the act of making self-propelled choices based on a human being’s inner growth and knowing.

     The author reveals also what fast eating means, hunched eating, eating without breathing. I especially appreciated his reading of “one-minute eaters” who

“…find it hard to take time to enjoy themselves, have difficulty receiving nurturance from others or listening to the promptings of their own hearts.”

     As I tend to eat very quickly, particularly shocking for me was his characterization of eaters who swallow things whole, that they “want their hungers in life satisfied but are unwilling to take the necessary steps.” Ouch.
As a teacher of mine says: “How you do one thing is how you do all things.”

How we eat is how we approach the world.

     Just when I was wondering how exactly I could attempt to align myself with healthier eating without simultaneously giving sweet, addictive foods that extra sparkle of eat-me-ness, David uses one chapter to explain a five step exercise for slowing down and being present during a meal. It is immanently doable. It takes only presence, it takes listening. It takes receiving the food.

     This is a good book with profound integrity, and I am glad I read it. When I thought there wasn’t anything left that anyone could teach me about my own addictive eating behavior, David’s truth-telling exposed my blind spots. His is an especially common-sense work regarding the inner experience of eating.

My Superhero is Chocolate

Something has happened to chocolate. Or rather there has been a polar shift in the chocolate world, and everything has gone nitro, amped-up, blissed-out...chocolate-wise. Chocolate and cocoa in its raw form have become the new wonder foods, even though we’ve already loved them forever. It’s as if a hologram from the future has been superimposed over the chocolate we all know and love, and revealed a radical, new superhero chocolate, and its secret power is LOVE.

It has become the topic of museum exhibitions in Chicago. This hotel club blog lists chocolate museums around the world, the chocolate wrappers online museum links to a wide range of chocolate museums, while Christine visits two European chocolate museums that couldn’t be more different. It’s the same with chocolate. No two types are the same, and the flavors have an incredible range of varieties.

What’s happened is, people found out why cacao beans are a super food. First there was the Naked Chocolate book by Shazzie and David Wolfe that got everything going.
Shazzie is one of my favorite raw food’s people. She knows it’s all about the love, not just the food, and says so. Here, she shows how to make a rich, loaded-with-superfood, raw food, chocolate-based fudge-like dessert: “Go Go Goju.”



And one listen to Daniel Sklaar of New York's Fine and Raw as he makes a raw cacao confection, and you’ll begin to understand how cocoa-superfood desserts are such a rich amalgam of world cultures: his accent blends something Germanic, with New Zealand and New York City.



Mark “Chocolate” Canizaro has one of the best chocolate sites going. Here is his pretty long list of the “best” chocolate bars — check here to see how chocolate can be assessed with a wine-like connoisseurship. Canizaro correctly identifies Green & Black’s as being transcendental.

Canizaro was given the option by his parents to choose his middle name, and he chose Chocolate. Really! He runs chocolate-tasting tours in Seattle, explains why fair trade is so important, and how to distinguish organic chocolate, and puts paid to the myth that chocolate contains caffeine.

Sacred chocolate’s site is luscious and dreamy, I can’t stop looking at it, and they have collated a good fount of scientific information, including the mental, physical and spiritual effects of cocoa. You can even get custom or private label sacred chocolate from them. Their Sacred Fire truffle layers pepper, vanilla and cinnamon with five different chilis.

“Sacred Chocolate® is hand made with much love, gratitude, and high “phi-bration" in a small custom-designed, certified organic, vegan, kosher, halal, carbon-balanced factory in San Rafael, California.”

Finally, of all the new raw/organic/untoasted/pure chocolate companies now sprung up within the last five years, I was drawn to Lulu’s. It seems the perfect archetype for why so many nature-loving eco-entrepreneurs have gone into the chocolate business. Because cocoa carries an energy signature of otherworldly enchantment.

Lulu asks:

“What is a spagyric? A very old form of alchemy producing an amazingly potent plant medicine by working with all three essential levels of the plant: physical, energetic, and subtle. Spagyrics are also created by following planetary cycles, bringing you a purified and energized expression of Nature's green healing intelligence.”

This is what drives Lulu’s to put maca root, orchid flower, rose essence and California cedar, cardamom and tulsi into their jarred chocolate products, and offer pure cacao essence to use as a perfume. Also along superhero lines, Lulu’s is creating the dream with others in an intentional community in Hawaii.

How I Lost 60 Pounds Without even Trying - Fridays part 3

5. I walked around constantly. Of course, civic life in Europe is scaled to the human rather than the car, so everything you need for everyday life is within walking distance. Every time I ever went anywhere, it was by my own leg power. Also, we lived three stories up in a building from 1900, so I also had a significant climb a couple times every day.

I walked my child to school, I walked back home. I walked up the block to the library, I walked into the market square to buy something at Woolworth's, I walked back home. I walked into town to the ATM, I walked over to the coffee shop, I walked to get my groceries, and walked back home, and carried my groceries up the three flights of stairs. I walked out to my car, drove to the train station, parked, walked in, up and down stairs to the correct platform, off the train and walked through town. I walked to concerts and to the movies and back home again, even at night.

The more I walked, the more flexible and strong I became. It became so normal I wouldn't have dreamed of using the car to drive to the grocery store. Because I bought a little bit every day, I seldom needed to make a huge, multi-bag trip. Walking was just a part of life.

Tune in for more ways to learn how one loses 60 pounds without even trying, just by living the European lifestyle, next Friday...

Daily Ambushed by Joy

Read Emily Green's L.A. Times profile of Dale Pendell, (parked at Erowid) poet and entheogens expert, who writes about plant energies:

About writing: "The idea was that through immersion in each plant, something would come across in my style that would create a signature for the plant," he says.

I found this at Nick Herbert's Quantum Tantra.

How I Lost 60 Pounds Without even Trying - Fridays

3. I never ate a second helping.
At the first meal I ate with my in-laws after getting off the plane, I helped myself to another heaping portion. It tasted good and there was some left in the dish, so, why not? But there is something about having a very neat and self-righteous elderly father-in-law raise an eyebrow as you scoop into the vanilla pudding for a second time, that makes you never want to do it again. Ever. It was perhaps the first time that anyone so tidy and sure of himself ever reacted so naturally and critically to my overeating. As if there were limits and I should know what they were, and why didn't I? The meal was abundant, I had eaten plenty. There was dessert, and I had my share of that, too. My father-in-law wasn't interested in making sure I could exercise my unfettered liberty. His subtle judgment held a mirror up to my behavior, and I became aware of myself...overeating.

4. I ate out in restaurants a great deal less.
Restaurants in Europe can be expensive -- not necessarily the meals, but all the extras, like drinks. And, the service is structured so that you will be spending more than an hour for the experience. Either sitting there waiting to be brought the menu, waiting for your food which can take up to half an hour, actually eating it, or waiting for your server to come back and bring the bill...all told, it adds up to a long-term commitment of time and money. Again, it is undignified and weird there to rush through life's little pleasures. So, we went from eating out perhaps once or twice a week (either sit-down or fast food) in America to eating out once every four months and having take-away or fast food twice a month at the most.

Tune in for more ways to learn how one loses 60 pounds without even trying, just by living the European lifestyle, next friday...

The Sounds of a Meal

Cynthia Anderson-Bauer, encountering the sacred at a community meal in Kerala, India:
"The sounds of a kitchen, of a meal, served for all, that brings people of all walks of life together as equals: that is surely the sound of something holy."

Sacred Chow in Sag Harbor

On Rev. Donna Schaper's book: Sacred Chow: Some Holy Ways to Eat...

“We’re really in the middle of a sea change and how Americans look at food,” says Rev. Schaper, senior minister at Judson Memorial Church in Washington Square in New York City. “It came to me that the religious aspect of food hadn’t been thoroughly explored. The entire heart of our spirituality is the simple meal that is more than it appears … the heart of our faith is the meal.”

Please Mr. Postman

I just discovered the digital-spiritual imagery of Stevee Postman, from Portland, Oregon, creator of the Cosmic Tribe Tarot. Here is a mini-set called Uproot: the Vegi-Shaman six pack. 

Love these collage images of vegetal people, all male faces, dancing carrots...in mystical situations with fairy-vegetable beings glowing lotuses, waves of bliss. Please, please look at the larger images on his site!

"Below and above unite with here and now, activating a garden of enlightened awareness alive with cosmic flavor & excellent fragrance. A visual feast that will nourish and inspirit with the nectar of creativity."

Dreaming what the Plants Say

"Fifteen years ago i had an odd dream. in it, a medicinal plant that I was interested in, an Usnea lichen that is ubiquitous on trees throughout the world, told me that while it was good for healing human lungs it was primarily a medicine for the lungs of the planet, the trees. When I awoke, I was amazed. It had never occurred to me in quite that way that plants have some life and purpose outside their use to human beings."
-- Stephen Harrod Buhner, from
The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines for Life on Earth

One Way to Give up Eating Animals

On a somewhat boring day I had to make lunch for myself and my boys. There was some sort of health food-esque frozen Asian-style stir fry in the freezer I decided to serve over rice. It involved frying the breaded chunks of chicken and heating up the sweet and sour sauce. Now, this was not some cheapy meal, it had been marketed as a high quality convenience food, which I now see as an oxymoron, but anyway: it came from a health food supermarket.

I served it up. My mood was not nurturing and languid, it was rushed.

(This battery farm, stuffed with live chickens who never go outside, is meant to be especially humane because unlike most of them, this one is not entirely shut in darkness.)

I took a bite. At first, the tangy sauce made me think it was tasty -- it was an explosion of hot and sour and lemony flavor. The flavor was a familiar one: a loud flavor, a flavor to force someone to salivate, it was a flavor bent on creating a breathless reaction in me -- food porn.

Food porn isn't only the luscious, tantalizing pictures of meals, rather, it is the deliberate manipulation of flavor so that it immediately and without any specific or deeper intent, arouses a person's appetite, completely devoid of connection to authentic desire, hunger, or will. It is separate from the inner calling to eat. It pushes you to react and never truly fulfills -- just like the intent of manufactured porn culture.

This quick intensity of flavor is not hiding something more substantial behind it -- it IS the point of these kind of meals, and it is a particularly common form of industrial food preparation in the United States. Fast-acting, strong, overwhelming flavor meant to trick the person into feeling quickly and easily fed and filled.

But...
I was invested and hungry so I only discovered this pornish manipulation with hindsight. I still kept eating.

The third bite introduced something burnt, something sinister -- it was more of a feeling than a flavor, it was an emotion coming from the meat, which was chicken.

I could feel what was in the chicken, all that had composed its life. It came rushing up: a quick, meaningless, joyless life, and a fast, violent death as a teenager. A female chicken denied even feeling the sun and picking through grass and mating and laying eggs. She was denied everything but sitting in the squawking chaos of hundreds like her, waiting without knowing that she was only allowed to live in order to die, without even any kind of conscious honor in her sacrifice as my food.

I was eating a young animal who had no chance to live according to its ancestral dream. There I was, eating emotions of this animal, seeing the whole picture: there was a confusion, a loss of understanding, a brittle, scattered, immature feeling to this beast, such a taste of futility and waste and exhaustion -- and I was eating this. With every bite I was taking it in.

It wasn't simply that these were amorphous, ephemeral feelings coming from my own brain, my own imaginings, in a society where spirit and body are thought to be separate, if indeed spirit is acknowledged at all.

This very pain and chaos WAS this animal's meat, the emotions and its experience were as part of the flesh as its cells and sinew. I was eating this creature's brief life. This was going into me and becoming a part of me. I was eating convenience, I was eating rushing, I was eating mechanization, I was eating profanity...and it was turning me into a mechanized, rushed, thoughtless, profane being of convenience.

I felt nauseous and started to gag.

People postulate about why they might consider giving up meat, under what conditions. Some say as long as the animal has been able to experience a normal life, it isn't so bad to kill it for food. Or, there's the theory that as long as we feel gratitude and experience the animal's sacrifice as sacred, it's okay to kill it for food. Some think as long as you are involved in the killing, then you have earned the right to eat it's life...Most of all of these more soulful options is missing from the vast majority of meat preparation in the western world.

All I know is, I had been trained to ignore feeling the animals. Some people are better at this than others. I have sometimes eaten meat that I knew was tainted with sorrow and futility and angst and horror...and eaten anyway, because I was conditioned to the flavor and conditioned to ignoring emotion, and was hungry.

But the better I can feel, the more I can spend of my life in a feeling state, then I experience the feelings of the animals, and it becomes unacceptable to eat tortured animals. For a purely selfish reason: I cannot put that torture and pain into my body. I cannot process and put away and deal with and handle that pain, which is a palpable energetic reality. And I find I will not participate in that torture and pain, anymore.

That is how we become vegetarians. We let the feelings come in.

The Passions of the Dream Work Magic

My son Stuart and I went to the Tattered Cover Bookstore last night to listen to Robert Moss speak about his book, Dreamgates.

He was very engaging, a great storyteller, clearly at the top of his game in a genre: shamanic dreaming, that he has been restoring to the western world for decades. It was inspiring to be in the presence of someone who radiates authentic, grounded shamanic wisdom. I was charmed by his Australian accent, which reminded me of my four years there, and would gladly undertake study with him.

From his website: "A central premise of Moss’s approach is that dreaming isn’t just what happens during sleep; dreaming is waking up to sources of guidance, healing and creativity beyond the reach of the everyday mind."

I asked about the fragments of dreams. I often have dreams that are so psychedelic that I can't find the thread of the meaning. Surely it is easier to bring a dream's message into this waking world when there is a logical narrative to follow. My dreams tend to go like this: While tulips sprout from the ceiling, my mother hurriedly drops a package of bacon on the floor while an albatross taps its beak against the window.

A friend of mine has the most lucid, fairy-tale like dreams. She is English, and has a memory and talent for narrative that can only be said to have been cultivated over the millenia from Taliesin onwards in her bloodlines. She dreams like this: A white owl spreads its wings and leads her to an abandoned church where a wizened hag stoops over a steaming broth...

Mr. Moss said that he is in favor of dream fragments because they provide disparate clues which one can follow further during shamanic journeys, or even further in dreams. Journey separately to the tulips, or to the albatross, or to the bacon, for further enlightenment.

Especially relevant was: perhaps the appearance of a particular food in a dream provides a clue that you need that food (or should avoid that food) in your waking life. Let's say that food is carrots. The circle is completed when we recognize a wink and a nod from spirit during our waking life: a friend shares a recipe for shredded carrots, our attention is drawn to a handbag with carrots on it.

From his blog of that night: "We need to regard dreams more literally and waking events more symbolically."

He went on to speak movingly of other cultures' centrality of dreams and attention to sharing them, and how dreams in modern society are disregarded, how even the human need to dream cannot be satisfied during our unnatural sleep patterns -- this has a great deal to do with why so many people suffer from a dream drought.

As he was signing his book for us, Mr. Moss introduced himself to my eleven year-old son and shook his hand. He gave me an intense look after he asked Stu if he remembers his dreams, and he suggested that we buy him a notebook in which to write them down. (With workshops filled with dreaming women, there is a shortage of male dreamers.)

Stu's grandfather is a great dreamer and rememberer, so notwithstanding my bizarre dreams, I believe Stuart was there with me to brush his dreamer's wings against the dreaming expert that night.

www.tatteredcover.com/

www.mossdreams.com/

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1577318919/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=486539851&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=051788710X&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=08BECDW42KP1RV8ZCJC6

http://mossdreams.blogspot.com/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliesin

Going Raw Stories, 1

Raw chef Mila at Raw Radiance is in Delicious Magazine with an article about emotional eating. She has put up 3 other posts related to the issue: Overcoming Emotional Eating

Compulsive Emotional Eating, including thoughts about a talk given by Angela Stokes-Monarch who pioneered the change to a raw diet to revolutionize her body...

And Mila's personal look back at where she was when she started eating raw, and how far she's come.

Very inspiring!

Sacred Quinoa Facts

A sweet post from Katharine about Quinoa, the sacred grain of Ecuador: WHERE DID SHE GO?: Quinoa Soup = SUPERFOOD!


What WIKI has to say about Quinoa: a chenopod, technically...

"Committed to environmental protection and poverty reduction, Andean Naturals offers only non-GMO, organically-farmed products from small producer groups."

Beautiful photos of the Bolivian quinoa planting cycle and harvest.

"Quinoa contains more protein than any other grain; an average of 16.2 percent, compared with 7.5 percent for rice, 9.9 percent for millet, and 14 percent for wheat. Some varieties of quinoa are more than 20 percent protein." - Quinoa.net

Drink "Quinoa Gold" and step back 5000 years. A Rhode Island company developed a Quinoa-based protein drink four years ago.
Quinoa
Here's how to make a sprouted quinoa pilaf, at Coconut and Quinoa.

How I Lost 60 pounds of fat Without even Trying

Several years ago I moved to Europe. After three babies, I weighed about 260 pounds, but felt I was only about 200. That is what my driver's license said: 200 pounds. I was in denial of the extra 60. I figured I could get rid of it before anyone really checked.

I was a mother staying at home for the children. I didn't have a job. I found myself sitting daily in our Jugendstil-era apartment, alone, deciding what to do with the rest of my life. I didn't speak the language. My husband found himself working a great deal more hours than he had done in America. Our grand European adventure wasn't necessarily grand or adventurous.

Yet over the course of about two years I lost 60 pounds. Without even trying to lose it. What happened was: I gradually acclimatized to the European lifestyle, and it simply took the pounds away. I did not intentionally eat less. I did not exercise on purpose. I did not exercise any willpower to change myself, believe me. I never weighed myself. I wouldn't have dreamed of counting calories.

So what did I do? Here is the list. Here are the first two parts of a ten part series. Yes! There are ten parts to it, to post every Wednesday. Read on...

1. I never ate between meals. In Europe, if you're eating something and not sitting down during a meal, people will look at you quizzically. Why are you eating? Are you sick, is something wrong? Do you have a medical condition? We only eat during mealtimes: what's so hard about that?

2. I never ate anywhere unless I was sitting in a chair at a table. I never ate in town, walking around (rarely: an ice cream cone), I never ate in my car, I never ate standing up. People watch other people much more closely in Europe. There are people sitting at outdoor cafes and walking past you almost all the time. If you are doing something unusual, folks will look at you and not even attempt to disguise their interest, curiosity or contempt. So it feels quite uncomfortable to be the only person in a 3 mile radius walking and eating a sandwich. It is undignified, it is sloppy: not even little children do it. The public approbation really does its work on the individual. It looks desperate and wrong to eat in public unless you are taking the time to enjoy a meal. That's just how it is.

Join me next Friday for more...

Not to Meat

A friend of mine told me how he stopped eating meat. He had for years given free rein to his desires: he smoked, he ate whatever he wanted.
This was in Europe, and a heavily meat-eating culture, in a region where there is even less accommodation made for vegetarians. Where the thought of going without meat is far more freakish than in the English-speaking world of today.

My friend was also addicted to documentaries, and one night he watched one about the treatment of animals during the raising and butchering process. He went to bed that night and woke up in the morning and never ate animals again.

How did you stop eating meat? Tell me.

Here are some ideas:
The Easy Way to Give up Meat: http://lighterfootstep.com/2007/05/the-easy-way-to-give-up-meat/.

A pretty comprehensive list:
49 Good Reasons for being a Vegetarian, http://www.britishmeat.com/49.htm

Refuting one of the most common beliefs, that vegetarianism makes you weak:
Giving up Meat doesn't hurt Princeton's athletes, http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2008/02/27/20262

And a wonderful article by Johnathon Safran Foer about how and why he decided to go
meatless: The Fruits of Family Trees, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/magazine/11foer-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Apologies to everyone who decided years ago to give up flesh-eating...find out how far or how little the debate has advanced since then.